Monthly Archives: March 2022

Western Hegemony's Collapse

Putin: “West’s Global Dominance both Politically and Economically – Ends”

Leave a comment

via RT

The Russian president says that the “myth of the Western welfare state, of the so-called golden billion is crumbling.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has opined that the latest raft of unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and its allies over the Kremlin’s military campaign in Ukraine, mark the end of an era. According to Putin, from now on the West will be losing its “global dominance” both politically and economically.

Speaking on Wednesday, the Russian head of state proclaimed that the “myth of the Western welfare state, of the so-called golden billion is crumbling.” Moreover, it is the “whole planet that is having to pay the price for the West’s ambitions, and its attempts to retain its vanishing dominance at any cost,” Putin claimed.

The Russian president has predicted food shortages across the world as Western sanctions against Russia had adversely affected the entire global economy.

Touching on the decision by several Western powers to freeze Russia’s central bank assets, Putin claimed that this would only serve to irreparably undermine trust in those nations, and make other countries think twice before placing their reserves in the care of those countries. According to the Russian president, nearly half of Moscow’s assets were “simply stolen” by the West.

Addressing people in the West, the Russian leader said that the massive sanctions imposed on Russia were already backfiring on the US and Europe themselves, with governments there trying hard to convince their citizens that Russia was to blame.

Putin warned ordinary people in the West that attempts to portray Moscow as the primary source of all their woes were lies, with a lot of those issues being the direct result of the Western governments’ “ambitions” and “political short-sightedness.”

The Western elites, according to Putin, have turned their countries into the “empire of lies,” yet Russia will keep on presenting the whole world with its own position, no matter what.

Saving Ukrainians from Themselves

MSM Wonderland: Russia Defeated and Putin Assassinated?!

Leave a comment

by Finian Cunningham via
Strategic-Culture

Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine takes war to a new level of information warfare. Over the past three weeks, Western mainstream media has unleashed a tsunami of false information and distortion that has swept many people off their feet in disarray.

Appropriately, if not actually intended, on March 15 – the Ides of March no less – we had front pages blaring that Russia’s troops were facing defeat in two weeks. The NATO-backed Kiev regime forces “had Russian troops on the run”, or so we were told.

On the same date – famous for ominous predictions – Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky was reported by Western media as urging Russian soldiers to surrender such was, it was implied, the futile no-win situation for them.

So make a note of that. By the end of this month, as the Western media messaging goes, Russia will be defeated by the NATO-backed Ukrainian rag-tag of NeoNazi brigades. Not only that but as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham and American social media corporations have intimated Russian President Vladimir Putin may be assassinated.

The concoction of Shakespeare and Julius Caesar as a way to portray the conflict in Ukraine finds a handy cipher in the form of Ukraine’s Zelensky, the man who formerly was a comedy actor before he became president in 2019. Zelensky last week addressed the British House of Parliament by video to standing ovations, with stirring words channeling the famous English Bard and also wartime hero Winston Churchill. It was political theater written by Zelensky’s handlers in the CIA and MI6.

The actor-politician is pretty convincing too. He has played up his purported Jewish ancestry and Holocaust relatives as a way to undermine Russia’s claims of Neo-Nazi paramilitaries over-running Ukraine. Russia’s information on the Azov Battalion and other fascist formations is corroborated and well-documented by independent sources.

Zelensky has been at once a man of many parts. Some Western media remark on his high-profile public appearances rallying Ukrainians to resist, yet at the same time, incongruously, he has also been busy making defiant speeches dressed in military fatigues from what appears to be a secret bunker. That alleged precaution, we are informed (sic), is to prevent the Russian military from discovering his exact location and assassinating him with an airstrike.

A glitch in the drama – seemingly unnoticed by the fawning media – were reports of the prime ministers from Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia flying to Kiev on March 15 to meet with Zelensky and to demonstrate European solidarity.

Really? If Zelensky was hiding in bunkers out of fear for his life from Russian missiles and if Kiev was such a war zone from alleged indiscriminate airstrikes – as the Western media report wall-to-wall – would these European leaders really venture into the Ukrainian capital?

The conflict in Ukraine appears to be like no other in terms of the rampant false information and virtual realities that the Western media are using. It’s reminiscent of the Western hysteria over Syria and the “Siege of Aleppo” in late 2016 which turned out to be liberated by the Syrian army and its Russian allies from Western-backed terrorists. Images of explosions and civilian casualties attributed to Russian forces have been identified as being clipped from other wars, locations and years. Airstrikes in Gaza by Israeli forces have been reported as occurring in Ukrainian cities. Even Hollywood disaster movies have provided images recycled for “reports” of alleged Russian violations.

No doubt the Russian military intervention in Ukraine has caused suffering and displacement. What war has ever not? A Russian news program was disrupted when one of its employees mounted an anti-war protest on air.

But this war could have been avoided if the U.S. and its NATO allies had heeded Russia’s long-time security concerns. The weaponization of Ukraine since the CIA-orchestrated coup in 2014 and the unleashing of Neo-Nazi forces against Russian-speaking people were bound to result in war. The last straw was when Russian efforts at negotiating were met with relentless intransigence by the NATO powers.

Moscow says its military operation launched on February 24 will continue until the Kiev regime agrees to foreswear joining NATO, to eradicate its Neo-Nazi paramilitaries, and recognize Russia’s historic claim to Crimea as well as recognize the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Zelensky has responded erratically like the puppet on a string he indubitably is. There have been four rounds of negotiations between his representatives and Russia. The Ukrainian CIA-MI6 puppet has at times talked about giving up on NATO membership and acceding to Russia’s territorial claims. Then he flips by giving defiant resistance speeches and calling for Russia’s surrender. The conclusion is that Zelensky and his regime are not serious about negotiating a resolution. Their function is to string out conflict as long as possible in order to undermine Russia and prolong the misery of the Ukrainian population – many of whom are glad to see Russian forces get rid of this corrupt regime.

The Western reporting on the conflict in Ukraine like Zelensky and his regime is something of an elaborate propaganda chimera. We are told the war is due entirely to the mad ravings of an evil Russian tyrant called Vladimir Putin – who, ludicrously, is comparable to Hitler. Western trashy tabloids as well as high-brow people like the US-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warn us that “Mad Vlad” is ready to use nuclear weapons or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. This is from Western media whose governments and military establishments were running biowarfare labs in Ukraine and who are training Neo-Nazi death squads.

Indeed, we may beware the Ides of March. Western propaganda is foretelling the downfall of Russia. The media are making Russia look desperate and depraved ready to use weapons of mass destruction. What for? A seeming self-fulfilling prophesy where they get to play savior of Ukraine? The really desperate side is the side that is really desperate.

The End is Here

The End of the Empire of Lies

Leave a comment

by Jim Hoft via The Gateway Pundit

In Joe Biden’s first year in office over 2 million illegal aliens from dozens of countries walked into the United States across the southern border.

The numbers this year look even greater.

Joe Biden and DHS Secretary Mayorkas immediately opened up the US southern border after they came into office.

Biden also set another record. Only 59,011 illegals were deported his first year in office. This was the lowest number since 1995.

Now Mayorkas is working on a very important project. Rather than shut down the border, Mayorkas released new rules on “extremism”.

The new guidelines on extremist behavior include those who question the fraud in the 2020 election and anyone who question the regime’s talking points on COVID and its treatments including the mandates.

A March 2021 unclassified threat assessment prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Department of Justice, and DHS, noted that domestic violent extremists “who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.”3 The assessment pointed to newer “sociopolitical developments such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence” that “will almost certainly spur some [domestic violent extremists] [sic] to try to engage in violence this year.”4

Over half of the US population question the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Another half of the public questions the ever-changing COVID talking points coming from the medical elites including Dr. Fauci who lied under oath about his funding of gain of function research in Chinese labs.

If you mention this you may end up on their list.

These are really bad people.

Here is a copy of the new DHS guidelines against speech by the criminal Biden regime.

Report to the Secretary of Homeland Security Domestic Violent Extremism Internal Review Observations, Findi… by Jim Hofton Scribd

Western Hegemony's Collapse

Big! Petrodollar Cracks: Saudi Arabia Considers Accepting Yuan For Chinese Oil Sales

Leave a comment

BY TYLER DURDEN via zeroHedge

One of the core staples of the past 40 years, and an anchor propping up the dollar’s reserve status, was a global financial system based on the petrodollar – this was a world in which oil producers would sell their product to the US (and the rest of the world) for dollars, which they would then recycle the proceeds in dollar-denominated assets and while investing in dollar-denominated markets, explicitly prop up the USD as the world reserve currency, and in the process backstop the standing of the US as the world’s undisputed financial superpower.

Those days are coming to an end.

One day after we reported that the “UK is asking Saudis for more oil even as MBS invites Xi Jinping to Riyadh to strengthen ties“, the WSJ is out with a blockbuster report, noting that “Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price its some of its oil sales to China in yuan,” a move that could cripple not only the petrodollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market – something which Zoltan Pozsar predicted in his last note – and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia, but also a move aimed squarely at the heart of the US financial system which has taken advantage of the dollar’s reserve status by printing as much dollars as needed to fund government spending for the past decade.

According to the report, the talks with China over yuan-priced oil contracts have been off and on for six years but have accelerated this year as the Saudis have grown increasingly unhappy with decades-old U.S. security commitments to defend the kingdom.

The Saudis are angry over the U.S.’s lack of support for their intervention in the Yemen civil war, and over the Biden administration’s attempt to strike a deal with Iran over its nuclear program. Saudi officials have said they were shocked by the precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year.

China buys more than 25% of the oil that Saudi Arabia exports, and if priced in yuan, those sales would boost the standing of China’s currency, and set the Chinese currency on a path to becoming a global petroyuan reserve currency.

And so the pieces of the endgame are falling into place: Russia starving being denied selling the western world the much needed resources, sending commodity prices ever higher, while it’s silent partner China quietly picks up the pieces and takes advantage of Russia’s isolation to approach all those other “non-western” former petrodollar clients to offer them a new product, the yuan, which Beijing is now actively and aggressively pushing to dethrone the dollar as a global reserve currency.

Saving Ukrainians from Themselves

Ukraine – Officials Announce False Flag Attack – Sanctions Hit Back

Leave a comment

via Moon of Alabama

There is significant danger that the Ukraine, the UK or the U.S. will launch a false flag attack in Ukraine.

People have started to take note of the directional fear mongering that is coming from various ‘western’ officials.

The Sirius Report @thesiriusreport – 23:36 UTC · Mar 12, 2022

Setting the scene for a false flag?Polish President:
If Putin uses weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine, NATO will have to think seriously about what to do.
You would have to be sub 100 IQ not to see what is going on.

To which I responded:

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA – 17:56 UTC · Mar 13, 2022

They are indeed doing this on all channels.
IMHO an upcoming false flag attempt to get NATO into the fight.

Historian and Russia expert Gilbert Doctorow points into the same direction:

Warning: it is “highly likely” the United States is now about to carry out a ‘false flag’ operation in Ukraine in which it will accuse the Russians of using chemical weapons.
…
The caption which yahoo.com is now carrying reads as follows:USA Today: Russia could be preparing for chemical weapons attack; 35 killed in strike on base near Lviv: Live updates
Now why would Russia stage a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine? The idea defies all reason. Russia has vast possibilities of destroying Ukraine that it has not deployed to date precisely to avoid civilian casualties. These include cyber attack, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and more intense use of its airpower which has been restrained due to shortage of smart bombs and reluctance to use munitions that might cause greater collateral damage.
Given these manifest signs of Russian caution in staging the war, even at the cost of greater casualties among its own troops and slower progress in a campaign that is very time sensitive, one would have to be utterly mad to consider using universally banned chemical weapons. I rest my case: any so-called chemical attack which may be staged in Ukraine in coming days can only be the dirty work of the United States and its agents.

Having seen how easy it was to deceive the ‘western’ media by staging a fake hospital attack one can easily understand how a fake ‘chemical attack by Russia’ would lead to a public stampede that would push NATO into the Ukraine war.

Meanwhile Patrick Lancaster reports from Donetsk:

Patrick Lancaster @PLnewstoday – 10:47 UTC · Mar 14, 2022#BREAKING Dozens Killed By Ukrainian Cluster Bomb Attack On Center Donetsk. Full report coming soon
video

The U.S. is trying to pressure China to join their anti-Russian campaign. Yesterday ‘anonymous officials’ claimed, without evidence, that Russia had asked China for military and economic aid.

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA – 20:21 UTC · Mar 13, 2022“U.S. officials said ..” equals “Guaranteed to be a lie ..”
Quoted Tweet:

Michael Birnbaum @michaelbirnbaum · 17h
NEW, and BIG -> Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials said. @nakashimae scoop. https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/..

“Scoop” now means picking up the phone when some official calls you to plant a lie.

Russia is exporting weapons to China, not importing weapons from it. China has now confirmed that there were no such Russian requests:

Beijing blasted Washington’s recent allegations as disinformation that Russia sought military assistance from China to conduct its special operation in Ukraine, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a briefing on Monday.”The allegations on the matter disseminated by the US are false information,” the diplomat specified.

The first story on this also includes this lie:

In recent days, Chinese diplomats, state media organizations and government agencies have used a range of platforms and official social media accounts to amplify a conspiracy theory that says the Pentagon has been financing biological and chemical weapons labs in Ukraine.

That is not a conspiracy theory but, as Tulsi Gabbard points out, a hard fact which even the U.S. government now admits.

The British press took note of it:

Vladimir Putin could unleash biological weapon from seized Ukraine lab, experts fear

The U.S. is delusional in its attempts to deter China from working with Russia:

Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, is scheduled to meet on Monday in Rome with Yang Jiechi, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s elite Politburo and director of the party’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission.Mr. Sullivan intends to warn Mr. Yang about any future Chinese efforts to bolster Russia in its war or undercut Ukraine, the United States and their partners.
“We are communicating directly, privately to Beijing that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them,” Mr. Sullivan said on CNN on Sunday.
“We will not allow that to go forward and allow there to be a lifeline to Russia from these economic sanctions from any country, anywhere in the world,” he said.

China will of course continue to have good relations with Russia. It is not for the U.S. ‘to allow’ or disallow China to trade with Russia. The Biden administration has nothing it could do about it. It should stop its campaign and think about how it can dig itself out of the huge hole it has jumped into.

Reviewing the trade shock ‘western’ societies will now experience because of their extensive sanctions campaign against Russia Yves Smith concludes:

Although the complexity of this situation makes it impossible to make any forecasts, consider: a worst case scenario is much much worse than stagflation. Just wrap your mind around the consequences the merely the two outcomes described above: a fair bit of famine and supply shortfalls, even potentially problems with maintaining some critical infrastructure due to chip scarcity. Some of that productive capacity loss could become permanent due to business failures.And let us remind you … so far we are discussing only what the West has done to itself. What happens if Russia goes full Smoot-Hawley and retaliates, or engages in the passive aggressive version, as in no formal pronunciations, just supplies go to friendlies and the West gets chocked down, not 100% but enough to feel like that.
The Democratic Party is in the process of executing a controlled flight into terrain. Too bad that we are along for the ride.

Yesterday and today there seemed to be only minor Russian movement on the battlefield. Presumably Russia is regrouping its forces for the next steps. What those are going to be is for anyone to guess. They will come as soon as the current negotiations between Kiev and Moscow fail. The U.S. will see for that to happen.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Naomi Wolf Confirms Big Pharma Was Adding Varying Amounts of Active Ingredient to Batches of COVID Vaccine (VIDEO)

Leave a comment
By Jim Hoft via The Gateway Pundit

Former Clinton adviser and COVID Vaccine critic Naomi Wolf joined Steve Bannon on The War Room on Monday morning. Naomi shared her latest bombshell from her investigation into the Pfizer vaccine documents released by the US government on their COVID vaccine testing. Naomi’s team of investigators, doctors and attorneys identified several US government documents that confirm that Pfizer was adding varying amounts of active ingredient to their experimental COVID vaccines. According to the data, the range of dangerous active ingredient went from 3μg, to 10μg, to 30μg, to 100μg depending on the batch they happened to inject you with.

As Naomi mentioned, this ties in directly with the website “How Bad Is My Batch” that was created so you could track how many adverse reaction incidents were linked to the vaccine batch you were given. 

Now there is proof via AMA documents that they are distributing different doses of the active ingredient in the COVID vaccines based on batch number.
What the hell?

 
What that means is that they were able to track your adverse reactions to various batches. Not only that, they sent various packed batches to certain groups and retained ability to follow adverse reactions to one batch that is 100 times the presence of dangerous ingredient to another with less that that ingredient.
It is a targeted genocide perhaps. If they deliberately sent certain batches to certain locations or ethnicity.
More and more is coming out. How very sad.
Why is this important? Because this was BILL CLINTON’S advisor uniting with Conservatives in questioning and eschewing shot pushes. This gives the left a chance to find a way past the people who have pushed them to be the face of hatred against Conservatives and those who pushed them to push that shot.
Fabricated Narratives

Joe Biden’s Electric Car Plans – Why They Are Impossible

3 Comments

Authored by Tom Harris via RealClear Energy (emphasis ours),

In his State of the Union Address, President Joe Biden promoted electric vehicles (EVs), trumpeting his plans to establish “a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.” In so doing, Biden is unwittingly supporting the worst humanitarian abuses in the world. This is because of the way in which the materials used in manufacturing the batteries that power today’s EVs are obtained.

To obtain a reasonable amount of power per pound of battery weight, EV manufacturers generally use various forms of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, so named because the battery’s positive electrode, called the cathode, is largely made up of the highly reactive metal lithium (Li). To keep the cathode stable when a battery is not in use, the lithium is combined in a metal oxide matrix, with different manufacturers using different combinations of metals.

Most EV manufacturers combine lithium with nickel, cobalt and manganese to create a Li-Ni-Mn-Co oxide matrix to form the cathode. Tesla substitutes aluminum (Al) for the manganese, yielding a Li-Ni-Co-Al oxide matrix for the cathode on their batteries. Tesla maintains that their formulae is more cost-effective as less cobalt is required.

In all cases, the negative electrode, called the anode, in an EV battery is composed mostly of graphite.

To support the huge EV expansion being promoted by Biden, we will need immense quantities of the materials needed to manufacture EV batteries, for example, lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, manganese and aluminum. Let’s consider the sources of just three of these substances—lithium, cobalt and graphite—to see where the human rights issues arise.

In a normal 1,000-pound Li-ion EV battery, there is about 25 pounds of lithium. Since lithium brines typically contain less than 0.1% lithium, about 25,000 pounds of brines are needed to get the 25 pounds of pure lithium. This is mainly extracted from Tibet and the highlands of Argentina-Bolivia-Chile (according to the U.S. Geological Survey, 58% of the world’s lithium reserves are found in Chile) known as the “lithium triangle.” Lithium production in Tibet results in dead, toxic fish, and carcasses of cows and yaks floating down the Liqi River. The Ganzizhou Rongda Li mine in Tibet has thoroughly poisoned this river.

Similarly, native peoples in the lithium triangle face contaminated streams needed for human consumption, livestock watering, irrigation systems with mountains left desolate over discarded salt from the lithium brining process. A report titled, “COMMODITIES AT A GLANCE Special issue on strategic battery raw materials” issued in 2020 by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development explained:

“Indigenous communities that have lived in the Andean region of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina for centuries must contend with miners for access to communal land and water. The mining industry depends on a large amount of groundwater in one of the driest desert regions in the world to pump out brines from drilled wells. Some estimates show that approximately 1.9 million litres of water is needed to produce a tonne of lithium. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, lithium and other mining activities consumed 65 per cent of the region’s water. That is having a big impact on local farmers – who grow quinoa and herd llamas – in an area where some communities already must get water driven in from elsewhere.”

A 1,000-pound Li-ion EV battery typically also contains about 30 pounds of cobalt. Cobalt ore grades average about 0.1%, so we need to process almost 30,000 pounds of ore to get 30 pounds of cobalt. With 50% of the world’s cobalt reserves, the Democratic Republic of Congo contributes almost two-thirds of global cobalt production. This is causing immense humanitarian abuses. Congo has at least 40,000 children—some as young as 4-years old—working with their parents for less than $2 a day. They are exposed to multiple psychological violations and abuse as well as significant physical risks. Engineer and energy consultant Ronald Stein and Todd Royal, an independent public policy consultant focusing on the geopolitical implications of energy, go into more details in their book Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping citizens understand the environmental and humanity abuses that support ‘clean’ energy”:

“Cave-in’s, constant exposure to toxic, radioactive water, dust, and dangerous air loaded with cobalt, lead, and uranium with other heavy metals breathed into lungs day-after-day so western citizens can feel good about their Tesla or wind turbine. Cobalt ore is sent to China since one of the larger mines in the Congo is Chinese-owned Congo Dongfang International Mining Company.”

A 1,000-pound EV battery also has 110 pounds of graphite. At 10% concentration, 1,100 pounds of ore must be processed for each battery. China is now producing about 70% of the global supply of natural graphite. Villagers living near graphite companies in provinces in Northeast China complain of “sparkling night air,” crop damage, homes and belongings covered in soot and polluted drinking water.

In his State of the Union address9, Biden spoke of promoting “environmental justice” and “expanding fairness.” The president said, “I will be honest with you, as I’ve always promised.”

Biden must now be honest about electric vehicles. They grossly violate basic environmental justice principles and are anything but fair to the poor of the world who suffer and die so that wealthy western elites can virtue signal with their electric vehicles.

Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

America’s “Strategic Thinkers” Can’t Think that America’s Power is Fading

Leave a comment
By DAVID P. GOLDMAN


Russia’s War On Ukraine Won’t Likely Bring The US And China Together. Image: Twitter

NEW YORK – Prominent American strategists whom I have known for years and who previously displayed signs of rationality have gone mad at the prospect of American strategic decline.
China is the obvious winner in the present international crisis. It has the luxury of choosing between two outcomes that increase its power: to act as a friend of all the parties in the Ukraine dispute and mediate the conflict, or to gain the battered Russian Federation as an ally. It probably can do both.
The United States put Ukraine on track for a violent confrontation with Russia by undermining the Russian-backed Minsk II agreement, which would have kept Ukraine out of NATO and allowed home rule for the Russophone provinces Donetsk and Luhansk within a sovereign Ukraine.
Russia charged that Washington intended to move nuclear missiles to the Russia-Ukraine border 300 miles from Moscow, and invaded Ukraine to preempt this. Whether the Biden administration insisted on Ukraine’s option to join NATO out of design or incompetence, US policy is now in ruins.
That leaves Washington debating how to deal with a China that fields 400 city-buster nuclear weapons and the ICBMs that would be needed to deliver them, as well as about 1,300 medium-to-long-range surface-to-ship missiles that probably can sink US aircraft carriers – not to mention a host of other strategic weapons.
It also leaves Washington a couple of steps away from a nuclear confrontation with Russia, which last October tested a submarine-launched hypervelocity glide vehicle, a super-fast cruise missile that could hit Washington in 60 seconds from a submarine a hundred miles offshore.
And it also leaves the United States with the prospect of the union of Russia’s formidable technical talent, including a cadre of engineers as large as America’s, with China’s burgeoning high-tech industry.
The simplest solution, in the view of former Defense Department official Seth Cropsey, is military confrontation with China. “One would expect the Russian invasion to formalize the return to traditional great-power politics, what theorists of international relations call ‘multipolarity,’ a system in which multiple political and military centers of gravity exist,” Cropsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal on March 9.

“This prediction is alluring and wrong,” Cropsey added, because of China’s lust for conquest: “China remains the crucial actor. The Communist Party under Mr Xi … drew a unique lesson from the Soviet collapse. The Soviets failed not because they didn’t integrate capitalist insights into their economy but because they never went far enough in their external expansion.”
I should add that Cropsey, a dedicated amateur cellist, is a personal friend; I have dined at his home in Washington and think him personable and literate. But the above statement suggests that he is subject to a maniacal delusion. China’s strategic thinking says exactly the opposite, that expansion caused the downfall of the Soviet Empire.
On this topic, I recommend a recent essay by Professor Wen Yang of Fudan University, a prominent columnist for the leading Chinese news site “The Observer.” Wen writes: “World hegemony exercised in the name of liberalism must be opposed by the people of the world, and world hegemony exercised in the name of communism also must be opposed by the people of the world.”
From the ashes of Ukraine, Cropsey avers, will arise a strategy for world domination that I would characterize as straight out of Fu Manchu: 

China will use Russia’s increasing isolation to transform Moscow into a petrochemical satellite, taking advantage of Western sanctions to secure Russian energy flows indefinitely.
In turn, China hopes that Russia, humbled or emboldened by its Ukraine adventure – and with or without Mr. Putin at the helm– will occupy Western attention as Beijing gobbles up the choicest Pacific possessions and extends its economic and diplomatic tendrils into the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe. Far from accepting independent Russian action, China is counting on Russian failure to accelerate the satisfaction of its boundless appetite.

Another old friend, former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, has taken the opportunity of the Ukraine war to promote his “Strategy of Denial,” which amounts to mining the Taiwan Strait and otherwise reinforcing Taiwan to forestall the mainland attack on Taiwan that Colby, like Cropsey, believes to be imminent.
I have known the affable Mr Colby – grandson of the late CIA chief William Colby – since he was a law student at Yale. I reviewed his book here, concluding:

There is a close analogy here to the outbreak of war in 1914. An American attempt to deny China access to Taiwan would have the same effect as the Russian mobilization that triggered the conflict, in Christopher Clark’s authoritative account.
If one side mobilizes, the other must also try to avoid a catastrophic disadvantage – and this is how great powers “sleepwalk” (Clark) into wars they do not want and cannot win.

I have asked Colby numerous times in public forms how likely he thinks it is that China’s DF-21 or DF-26 missiles could target and destroy an American carrier under full steam. Answer came there none. 
If the US takes military measures that make it possible to ditch the One China policy and establish Taiwan as a sovereign state, China may well act preemptively and seize the island by force. If US planes try to stop this, China may sink the carrier that launched them. That could start a nuclear war, as Admiral James Staviridis describes in his 2021 thriller 2034.
Colby’s reluctance to answer the decisive question – whether Chinese missiles can sink US carriers – puts him in the company of the naval strategists of 1940 who watched torpedo bombers sink their battleships from Taranto to Singapore to Pearl Harbor.
Military logic, though, has little to do with these outbursts. Cropsey, Colby and other old friends simply cannot wrap their minds around the miserable fact that American power is fading, the consequence of thirty years of grotesque blunders following the end of the Cold War. They cannot bear the idea that America might have to share power with a rising China, and in their heart of hearts, they prefer a war, even a losing one, to this sort of humiliation.
Other American strategists now argue that the United States should seek China’s help in dealing with the Ukraine crisis. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations – the center of the American Establishment – told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on March 11:

China is thinking, “Why the hell should we do the United States any sort of a favor? We’re not going to get rewarded for it.” We still have the tariffs in place that the Trump Administration put there, even though they’re not working. So why don’t we lift those? Why won’t we offer to have a new communique with China, a new broad agreement – they just had one with Russia – where we talk about among other things, something that’s important to them, the One China Policy.
We can be committed in some ways to Taiwan but in a way that reassures China Why can’t we open up new cooperation on Afghanistan? North Korea’s getting into the business of testing missiles and, for all I know, nuclear weapons. We need an agenda. But right now, you have this bipartisan unity of bashing China, and this is not the time for it. Putin is the more immediate strategic adversary and threat to our interests. China is a longer-term challenge.
We have to sequence this. We have to prioritize. We have to figure out a way of getting China more distant from Mr. Putin. Imagine what it would be if Xi picked up the phone and called Putin and said, ‘This isn’t working for me. I don’t want to get caught up in these secondary sanctions that the Americans are putting on. That isn’t helping me get what I want, my third term. Cool it, Vlad.’ Imagine if we could engineer that kind of phone call?
Follow David P Goldman on Twitter at @davidpgoldman

Current Events

EU Parliament Votes for Sanctions vs Poland, Hungary

6 Comments

via: Opindia

Is Orban done?

The European Union has decided to impose economic sanctions on its two member states, Poland and Hungary, even as the two countries deal with the influx of over 1.5 Million Ukrainian refugees in the last 2 weeks. European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of these sanctions on Poland and Hungary in the middle of the unfolding humanitarian crisis.

In a press release, European Parliament stated that it was high time for the Commission to protect the EU budget from violations of rule of law. It also mentions that EU funds must be protected from countries that undermine the EU’s “liberal democratic values”. As per European Union laws introduced in January 2021, EU member countries that bend the rule of law are not eligible to receive funds from the EU.

478 MEP (Members of European Parliament) voted in favour of these sanctions, while 155 voted against.

“EU laws are above national laws, even above the constitution of respective member states”

In October 2021, Poland’s top court had rejected the supremacy of EU laws over some judicial matters. A constitutional tribunal in Poland had stated that some EU treaty articles were incompatible with Poland’s constitution.

The European Commission had taken major objection to the Poland top court’s ruling and had stated, “EU law has primacy over national law, including constitutional provisions. All rulings by the European Court of Justice are binding on all member states’ authorities, including national courts.”

As per European Union, Poland and Hungary are not respecting these common EU laws, and are accused of curbing the freedom of courts, media and academics. In addition, they are accused of depriving LGBTQ+ people and migrants of their rights. The two countries had appealed against these European laws in the European Court of Justice but their plea was dismissed in February earlier this year.

With Billions of Euros at stake, this decision is bad news for both Poland and Hungary, particularly for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban who faces an election next month.

While the timing of this decision is just a coincidence, since the process was in the works since last year, still the decision to rob these countries of funds in the middle of a refugee crisis has been met with widespread derision. During the ongoing war in Ukraine, Poland has taken close to 1.5 million refugees, while Hungary has received nearly a quarter of a million refugees.

Eastern Europe Awakening

Who is Taking Control of Russian Counter-Sanctions?

Leave a comment

By John Helmer, Moscow via John Helmer
@bears_with

The first Moscow casualties of the US and European plan targeting President Vladimir Putin and triggering Kremlin regime change have been revealed in the release over the past ten days of three presidential decrees and a half-dozen implementing orders from the Russian prime ministry.

The breaking news is that there are no casualties — but one rumour of one casualty circulated by the spokesman of the president, Dmitry Peskov, in order to deny it.

Early on Wednesday afternoon, the state news agency RIA-Novosti published the headline, “The Kremlin knows nothing about the rumours of Nabiullina’s resignation, Peskov said.” He was referring to the Governor of the Russian Central Bank (CBR), Elvira Nabiullina, who has been in the job since 2013.

The 10-line report went on: “’No, we don’t know about that. The president has repeatedly assessed [favourably] the work of the Central Bank,’ Peskov said, answering a question from journalists whether the Kremlin is aware of the alleged resignation of Elvira Nabiullina from the post of head of the Central Bank and how the president assesses the work of the Central Bank. Earlier, Peskov said that Putin repeatedly praised the work of the Central Bank in general and its head Elvira Nabiullina in particular.”

Until Peskov issued this denial, there was no trace of a rumour in the Russian media that Nabiullina was thinking of resigning, or that the Kremlin had decided to remove her.

There has been active public criticism of Nabiullina’s decision to raise the Central Bank lending rate to 20%, and her apparent unpreparedness to combat the US sanctions, which have frozen more than $450 billion in Central Bank currency reserves, and cut Russia’s leading banks from the SWIFT transaction system.

Leading the attack on Nabiullina has been Sergei Glazyev, the former Kremlin economic adviser and now the minister in charge of macroeconomic policy at the Eurasian Economic Commission. Glazyev has been joined by Mikhail Delyagin, an economist and State Duma deputy. They have accused Nabiullina of “aiding the enemy”.

“If our country is a sovereign state,” Delyagin said on television on March 4, “then why is Ms. Nabiullina still the head of the Bank of Russia, and not under investigation? We have people in jail for economic crimes, and yet a person who has already caused the economy to crash in 2014 and is going to do it for the second time feels just fine at her freedom.”

What can be detected in the series of Putin decrees and orders by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin is that a group of officials led by Mishustin, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Federal Security Service Director (FSB) Mikhail Bortnikov, have taken charge of the new scheme to restrict Russian debt repayments to creditors in countries listed as hostile. This group is known as the Commission for Control of Foreign Investments (CCFI). According to Mishustin’s order No. 431-r of March 6, 2022, Nabiullina is not a member.

On February 28, the Kremlin issued presidential decree No. 79 for “special economic measures in connection with the hostile actions of the United States of America and those who joined them.” This required the domestic retention of 80% of foreign currency earned in Russian export of goods, services, patents, rights and intellectual property.

This decree also banned Russian residents from making foreign currency loans to non-residents offshore. These have been one of the favourite forms of capital outflow used by Russian bankers to strip domestic assets, defraud their banks, and launder the proceeds through chains of companies they control in havens abroad. The biggest Russian fraudsters abroad – Sergei Pugachev, Boris Mints, and Vadim Belyaev – have all used these schemes; they have been granted asylum by the governments of France, the UK, and the US.

Left: Boris Pugachev: through his Moscow bank he stole $1 billion directly from the Central Bank. He lives in France. Centre: Boris Mintsstole about $850 million from two banks under Central Bank supervision; he is living near London; Right: Vadim Belyaev of New York, who looted Otkritie and National Trust banks of about $3 billion.

On March 1, Putin signed a fresh decree, No. 81, titled “On additional temporary measures of an economic nature to ensure the financial stability of the Russian Federation.” This extended the ban over offshore transactions in foreign currency to loans, credits, transfer of shares, bonds and other securities, and the sale of real estate. This has been the oligarchs’ channel for borrowing from US and European banks against the security of shares in their Russian companies to buy palatial homes, motor yachts, art collections, racing cars, football clubs, charitable endowments, and other self-promotions.

The new decree is not quite a ban, however. The measure has created a “special procedure” of state control on “the basis of permits issued by the Government Commission for the Control of Foreign Investment in the Russian Federation and, if necessary, containing conditions for the implementation (execution) of such transactions (operations)”. This commission has now replaced the Central Bank, which had been in charge of the Russian capital outflow until now. The commission can now stop the outflow of cash and capital; or it can look the other way as the Central Bank has done.

On March 5, presidential decree No. 95 followed. This created the “Temporary Procedure for Fulfilling Obligations to Certain Foreign Creditors”. The western financial press and the US Treasury have reported the headline; they have missed the small print. For the next six months, this measure blocks all debt repayments in foreign currency by Russians to creditors based in hostile states. This is not exactly a total ban nor is it a debt default.

Instead, the Russian debtor is required “to send to a Russian credit institution an application for opening in the name of a foreign creditor or a foreign organization entitled, in accordance with its personal law, to record and transfer rights to securities (foreign nominee holder) in respect of which obligations are fulfilled, an account of type C intended for settlements under these obligations.” This account must be in roubles.

This decree also put a stop to Russians leaving the country in private jets with suitcases full of dollars or Euros. Russian citizens will be allowed to travel out of the country with no more than one suitcase containing $10,000 in cash at once, or several suitcases containing less but no more than $10,000 for the next six months, possibly longer. The exit of Euro cash is totally prohibited.

Click to read how Suleiman Kerimov, owner of Uralkali, the potash producer, and Polyus Gold, Russia’s leading goldminer, flew his cash to Nice to buy villas along the French coast until his arrest by French prosecutors, read this. For the favour Nabiullina has subsequently shown Kerimov in the bailout of Vozrozhdenie Bank, looted of about $2 billion by the Ananiev brothers, read this. The Ananiev brothers live under Cyprus and British protection, and also of the Guardian and Financial Times newspapers.

Decree No. 95 means that instead of defaulting in dollars or Euros to creditors in the hostile states, Russian debts must be settled “to a foreign nominee holder by transferring funds in roubles in an amount equivalent to the value of obligations in foreign currency and calculated at the official exchange rate of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation established on the day when the corresponding payment was made by the debtor to the account of type C of a foreign nominee holder opened in the Russian depository in the amount equivalent to the value of obligations in foreign currency and calculated at the official exchange rate of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation established on the day.”

In short, hostile state creditors are to be repaid in these rouble bank accounts from which the creditors must collect their money – if they can. Putin told Mishustin he had two days in which to gazette the list of hostile states. The list was issued the same day as order No. 430-r.

Source: http://static.government.ru/

The hostile states include all the well-known offshore cash hideouts – New Zealand for Pugachev, the UK for Mints, the US for Belyaev, as well as Cyprus, the British Channel Islands, British Gibraltar, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Here they are.

Source: http://static.government.ru/

Missing from the list of hostile states, and thus permitted for Russian debt repayment in their currencies are the independent islands of the Caribbean; the states of Central and South America (including the havens of Belize and Panama); the African states; the Arab states and Iran; the Asian states, including Pakistan, India, Myanmar, Laos, and China; and the independent Pacific island states including the Philippines, Fiji, Tuvalu, Nauru, New Guinea, Timor and Vanuatu.

While these decrees and orders acknowledge the Central Bank (CBR) as playing an administrative rule and rate-setting role, the real power to run the system, deciding which targets will be sanctioned, and how, has been moved from the CBR to the Foreign Investment Control Commission (CCFI).

In a fresh order from the prime ministry dated March 7, the government has listed the current membership of the Commission.

Source: http://government.ru/info/44751/

Administered by the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS), the CCFI was originally intended to regulate foreign penetration of strategic sectors of the Russian economy. In design this was comparable to the US Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS); for details of how CFIUS has been used to strike at Russian investments from palladium mining to steel mills in the US, click to read.

This is how the Russian commission began in 2008. Two years later, in 2010, the commission staff provided limited information about how many cases the secret chamber had reviewed; how many foreign investments had been approved, how many rejected. Early in 2021 the commission claimed that since 2008 it had reviewed 280 applications and rejected 23 – fewer than one in ten..

Until now the CCFI was restricted to capital flowing into Russia from abroad. For that reason, it was of primary concern to the espionage, security and defence agencies. That’s the reason FSB director Bortnikov and Defence Minister Shoigu have been members for a decade. The CFIUS in Washington has operated in much the same way, combining secret intelligence with equally secret corporate lobbying.

Russian capital outflow has depended on a very different power structure. Over the past thirty years the capital lost to Russia has totaled more than a trillion dollars; for details, click to read.

No modern state or European empire has made a state policy of such profligacy.

The Russian government official who created and ran this system of dometic capital destruction has been Alexei Kudrin (lead image, front row, left). He was also a Kremlin official under Anatoly Chubais when the oligarch system was created by Chubais (back row, left), then chief of staff for President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, in order to save Yelstin and steal the election of 1996. Under Putin since 2000, Kudrin, a Latvian by origin, was finance minister until 2011; he is currently head of the state auditor, the Accounting Chamber. Chubais, who is Jewish through his mother, has directed the privatization of the state electricity system under Putin, and then Rusnano, the state high-technology investment holding. He is currently Putin’s representative for international climate negotiations.

The two of them have been favoured by the US Government to take over the Kremlin; they still are. For the Chubais archive, read this. For the Kudrin file, click here.

Nabiullina’s career has been promoted by the two of them, and by their common ally, German Gref, currently head of Sberbank; click for his file. In Russian political shorthand, this group are the liberal reformers of the Yeltsin period; the pro-American and anti-military faction of the Putin period. They are among the most distrusted political figures in the country, according to the polls, which have ranked them together and close behind Alexei Navalny. They are unelectable.

As Kremlin appointees, however, they have dominated economic advice to Putin, protected the offshore capital exports of the oligarchs, and argued to cut the defence and security budgets. In effect, this group of officials has fought to prevent the accession of Crimea in 2014; to sabotage the rebuilding of Russia’s strategic and tactical deterrents to US and NATO attack; and for fear of the financial consequences from Washington and Brussels, to stop the Ukrainian military operation. About this, so far they have said nothing in public.

A search of the Russian individual sanctions list at the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has found “no result” for Chubais, Kudrin, Nabiullina, and Gref.

Source: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/

By contrast, Shoigu, Bortnikov, Glazyev and Delyagin have all been sanctioned by the US.

The Nabiullina group have been fighting to keep their power, and preserve the oligarchs’ advantages. A March 4 order from the prime ministry created their rival to the CCFI. The text of the order No. 417-r calls it the “subcommittee on improving the sustainability of the financial sector and individual sectors of the economy in the face of sanctions”. Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov (no US sanction) is to chair this group which includes several of the ministry and Kremlin officials who are also members of the CCFI. Nabiullina is a member; Shoigu and Bortnikov are not.

Source: http://static.government.ru/

Also included in this new group are Alexander Shokhin (lead image, back row, extreme right), who heads the oligarch lobby group known as the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs; and Igor Shuvalov (back row, 3rd from left), the first deputy prime minister for business support between 2008 and 2018. Shuvalov, currently head of the state Vnesheconombank (VEB), was sanctioned by Washington last week, along with five of his personal companies, his wife Olga, his son Yevgeny with his company and jet, and his daughter Maria and her company. Shuvalov has also just been sanctioned by the British government and a freeze imposed on his apartments neighbouring on Whitehall and Downing Street. Read the Shuvalov archive here.

In the war between the Moscow committees, there are already casualties from the friendly fire of the hostile states.