The Risks of Heeding America's Warmongers

America First with Steve Cortes (featured on RealClearPolitics) ^ | Feb 28, 2022 | Steve Cortes

[UnwashedPeasant]

Ruling Class laptop war-hawks commence a dangerous new weaponization of money.

Among the cognoscenti of the Western capitals of politics and finance, the chorus screams unanimously for ever-escalating economic sanctions against Russia. Lost amidst the cacophony of those calling for a historic financial bloodletting is a dispassionate and careful analysis of the potential peril of such unprecedented collective actions.

Specifically, for the first time ever, the powers of the Western World align to purposefully and willfully destroy the currency of a major power – and not just any power, but the most armed nuclear force on earth. The decision to essentially de-bank the entire country of Russia, save very key carve-outs (more on those elements in a moment), represents a brash entry into a heretofore uncharted path of the weaponization of money.

After all, even the despicable Nazi regime during WWII did not face this level of monetary attack. In fact, the Germans transacted internationally via the Bank of International Settlements, which remained neutral in a Switzerland which was then committed to that over-arching principle.

Today, the Russians find no such financial harbor, resulting in the recent absolute plunge in Russia’s currency. See this chart on the US Dollar vs. the Ruble:

Even a columnist for the Washington Post recognized the potential massive and dangerous unknowable ramifications of such actions. When the committed globalists of Jeff Bezos’s own leftist paper can recognize the dangers, everyone better start paying attention.

Here’s the main problem with this weaponization of money: it specifically and immediately targets the Russian people, rather than Putin, the Oligarchs, or their war machine. Regular Russian citizens now find themselves suddenly forced to deal with massive, runaway inflation. Their hard-earned wages become more and more worthless by the hour as their currency collapses as a direct consequence of the concerted efforts of ruling class elites in Washington, New York, London, and Brussels. What will be the fallout of cornering a proud nation of 145 million people in this manner?

Putin and his fabulously wealthy connected cronies can handle, at least in the near-term, such historic volatility -- but the masses of Russia cannot.

Biden, as usual, has this policy approach exactly backwards. If the main goal is to punish the leadership and starve Moscow’s war machine, then a cessation of purchases of Russian energy would be the actual, brutal, and effective prescription. Under Biden, even energy-blessed America welcomed in a surge of Russian energy imports in 2021, an 11 year high of Russian imports to the US. These products include over 200,000 barrels of Crude per day and over 700,000 total barrels per day of all fuel products from Putin’s Moscow, according to S&P Global.

These shipments continue unabated, right now, meaning America pours tens of millions of dollars of hard US currency into the accounts of the Oligarchs on a daily basis. Moreover, this flow of funds is somehow…miraculously…EXCLUDED from the otherwise onerous banking clampdown on Russian transactions.

Of course, America’s purchases of Russian energy, as large as they are, cannot compare to Western Europe’s, which remains totally beholden to Russian supplies, especially for Natural Gas. Those gigantic flows continue as well, proving the utter duplicity of the ruling class powerbrokers of the US and Europe. As blue-checks post Ukraine flags on their social media, they play a never-before attempted experiment in global Foreign Exchange warfare. But as these same virtue- signaling globalists pour out Russian vodka in performative protest, they welcome in torrents of Russian energy.

It seems as though this Ukraine-flag waving crowd of self-assured warmongers in the West actually wants the fighting to continue, otherwise they would resolutely refuse all Russian Energy, and leave the Ruble alone.

Clearly, many Western elites also clamor for regime change, hoping that a wave of economic pain upon the Russian people will compel an uprising – and it may. But it might also unleash rulers who are far less predictable and far more ferociously anti-American than Putin.

Recall that after America eliminated the terrible Saddam Hussein in Iraq, we ended up dealing with an even worse ISIS. In that scenario, at least the Caliphate did not possess nuclear weapons. The reality in Russia is quite different, of course, as the total warhead count in Russia exceeds America’s, see this Bloomberg chart:

Courage is the most important human virtue. Plenty of Ukrainians show real courage in repelling the Putin invasion. In contrast, there is nothing courageous about American politico laptop war-dogs constantly agitating for escalation, and instituting a money war against Russia.

The kinetic war that could well unfold from these actions will not be fought by these effete dilletantes, but instead by everyday American citizens from the heartland, by brave young men from flyover country with names like Mendez and Jackson.

Real courage in US politics right now requires standing up against the powerful and loud bi-partisan Washington War Machine.

[rrrod]

So we are supposed to ignore the Russian crimes against humanity?

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

Yes, the article is correct. The unintended consequences will not affect the idiots in power in the nuclear bunkers. Oh well...

[Navy Patriot]

Very interesting article.

Putin has the option of using the (fictional) Goldfinger method of turning the Sanctions attack back on the West.

[bert]

Pacifist cowards will get us all killed.

They are our enemies

[dfwgator]

[1Old Pro]

the chorus screams unanimously for ever-escalating economic sanctions against Russia

I'd be happy if everyone just stopped buying energy products and wheat from them and instead bought them from America.

[UnwashedPeasant]

"So we are supposed to ignore the Russian crimes against humanity?"

I think the point is that we are weaponizing money, which hurts the ordinary citizens, while we are exempting Russian oil and continuing to enrich the oligarchs.

Russia is an oil economy like Saudi Arabia, so it makes no sense to keep oil off the table. Biden has tougher sanctions on U.S. oil than on Russian oil.

[robowombat]

An excellent idea. Just as should have been done with Saddam, Former Yugoslavia, and most clearly Somalia Shit hole
Atrocity screaming is a great tool of deflection and for sanctimonious hysteria mongers to feel important and morally superior in an almost sexual way.

Those strongly about the purported crimes against what ever should hurry to the scene of the horror and take up arms against the forces of evil and leave the rest of to mind our own business.

[Widget Jr]

Of course not. The problem is how to have a effective response with the lowest possible negative effects, like what our Covid policies are not achieving.

The more important problem is Russia may have won before they started and most Western leaders do not realize or want to admit it. Putin's objective may not have been to go fast and take all of Ukraine as initially thought. If the real plan was to slow, take what they are getting, then negotiate, Putin is winning. The West is blindly reacting without any unified leadership or plan.

[sauropod]

bkmk

[Sam Gamgee]

If only we had this much passion where China is concerned. I dislike Putin but the marketplace will resolve this.

[sergeantdave]

“I think the point is that we are weaponizing money, which hurts the ordinary citizens, while we are exempting Russian oil and continuing to enrich the oligarchs.

Russia is an oil economy like Saudi Arabia, so it makes no sense to keep oil off the table. Biden has tougher sanctions on U.S. oil than on Russian oil.”

Your statement will completely fly over the heads of the 50-IQ, neo-con morons beating the war drums. Let’s also add that the neo-con’s hero Biden is trying to cancel the Israeli Leviathon gas field from supplying energy to Europe.

[mac_truck]

Russia has a 40% global market share of potash.

25% of the fertilzer Europe uses comes from Russia.

[Navy Patriot]

25% of the fertilizer Europe uses comes from Russia.

No problem there, the Europeans can just substitute Zelensky's speeches and comedy routines, they'll have all they need.

[bert]

China is different and passion here has nothing to do with the outcome.

First of all. China is. China is the most populous nation on earth and unlike near destitute Russia, has lots and lots of well educated and highly capable people.

There is nothing passionate Americans can do that will have significant effect on China

From my observations, I conclude that China is in economic flux. President Xi and his faction of the China Communist Party have created severe economic turmoil as they consciously, on purpose, bring about the destruction of private and family corporations. The CCP through owned corporations is achieving control and ownership of private business.

Hong Kong, a bastion and leader of capitalism is now gone as a capitalist force. The takeover and remaking of Hong Kong was a signal of things to come.

The business of major nations including the USA have left or are leaving. That is major international businesses damned here as globalists companies, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, American have closed resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

The China economy in large measure is based on domestic real estate. Ordinary people with some money don’t put it in the bank or buy stocks. They were conditioned to buy real estate. That real estate is Apartments. Sources say it is not unusual for a family to own two or three apartments that may or may not be finished or even started. Mortgage money is or was available cheap. It was easy to mortage a new apartment and pay it off over time. That is all over now. There are tens of thousands of vacant mortgaged apartments in play.

We should keep a close eye on General Motors. Half or better of GM revenue comes from sales in China. GM is in reality the minor pardnet in a Chins joint venture. The CCP ownership of the joint venture pardnership is unclear, but GM could easily be kicked out of china on it’s ass in just one day. Coupled with the intense pressure on market share by Tesla, GM is toast. I relish the thought of UAW families in economic extremis.

That has come to and end. The developers are pretty much all in extremis. Death has occurred or is near. At present while the dying is in process, it is unclear to me what the CCP will do. So far they are just watching, doing nothing to prevent the chaos.

President Xi leads the CCP but he has said that he is creating a new China Socialism. That is an undefined socialist economy that eschews the free market and the present Chinese capitalism but is not communism in the previous sense

However, Xi has opposition in and out of the CCP. It is unclear to me how effective that opposition actually is. It is unclear if it can even partially prevail.

Meanwhile....... what of the businesses that have left China? Have they gone home? No but having lost their China markets are setting up shop elsewhere. Else where includes Vietnam and perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines. For American companies Mexico is said to be included. But, serving world markets, they are not “coming home”

So, in conclusion, Americans have no say about the tremendous forces of change currently in process in China. Xi will succeed or fail on his own

We’ll see

[Dick Vomer]

So we are supposed to ignore the Russian crimes against humanity?

Which ones?

Before you list "war crimes" look back at our last 20 years in Iraq, Afghanistan or Lybia/Syria. Civilians deaths, thermobaric bombs, cluster munitions (maybe)... when Americans or our allies kill civilians, it's a mistake... but when Putin does it.. it's a war crime.

If we demand Putin go to prison or kill him, you and our leadership fails to thing about what a man will do if he has nothing left to lose..... he has nukes.

[rrrod]

Putinista.

[Dick Vomer]

Putinista

what does that mean

[Bratch]

The Motive for the Strategic Creation of BRICS Resurfaces in the Ukraine Conflict

March 3, 2022 | Sundance | 89 Comments

The BRICS alliance is a strategic geopolitical partnership between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.  The nature of the alliance is based on trade and big picture economics.

Readers familiar with our discussions of trade and international finance, will remember the importance we previously discussed with BRICS after the 2016 election and President Trump representing economic nationalism for the first time in several generations.  In this outline, we are going to share the bigger picture of why BRICS should now be back on the center stage of American focus.

Xi Jinping (China), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Narendra Modi (India) and Cyril Ramaphosa (South Africa),
the BRICS group.

The BRICS economic partnership was formed during the Obama administration.  Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) saw President Obama sub-contracting, actually giving away, U.S. trade policy to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  In the aftermath of the 2007 economic crisis created by the financial system, the BRICS group connected two central points that concerned them.

In the aftermath of the great housing/financial crisis, the relationships around the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), EU central banking system and various multinational institutions and, more importantly, multinational corporations, merged even closer with the government.  The priorities of the Davos and World Economic Forum (WEF) crowd were now virtually indistinguishable from many national governments.

We are fifteen years downstream from that inflection point, and we are now seeing the outcomes.  The WEF is now giving direct instructions to installed politicians for government policy.  Put another way, multinational corporations are now telling government officials what to do.

Think of “The Great Reset” or “Build Back Better” or climate change, as examples.  Worse yet, those governments are doing exactly what the WEF has told them to do.

This corporate control of government is exactly what the BRICS assembly foresaw when they first assembled.  When multinational corporations run the policy of western government, there is going to be a problem.  In the bigger picture, the BRICS assembly are essentially leaders who do not want corporations and multinational banks running their government.

As a result, if you really boil it down to the common denominator what you find is the BRICS group are the opposing element to the WEF assembly.

BRICS are not against capitalism in its original form; the BRICS assembly is against corporatism controlling the outcome of government policy.  The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa joined together in order to make sure their subset of economic power put government at the top of the control and power dynamic, and multinational corporations under them.  This is their essential commonality.

President Obama and the people around him from Hyde Park were/are domestically focused ideologues.  Much has been written about them, and we will not repeat.  However, the lesser emphasized point of the Obama era is how issues that touched on foreign policy were subcontracted to others.

Foreign policy was not a central focus for the Chicago team.  They were laser focused on fundamental change inside the United States.  Their aspirations were to reduce the geopolitical status of the U.S. on the world stage in the same view as an anti-colonialist would seek to break up the British colonial power structures.   This is an important reference point often missed.

Hillary Clinton could essentially manage the State Dept as she wanted as long as the overarching intent of the Obama policy was maintained.  Spreading the wealth, diminishing the U.S. role of influence, and raising up the rest of the world was the only objective of Obama foreign policy.

Obama took that same outlook toward U.S. strategic trade interests.  This is why President Obama subcontracted trade policy to the President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donohue (pictured above).

During President Obama’s terms in office, the U.S. CoC, the lobbying entity of Wall Street favor, literally was in charge of trade policy.  The U.S. CoC wrote the language, the actual terms and conditions of U.S. government trade policy.

At the time when the U.S. CoC was tasked and permitted to do this, the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal was being written.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was literally writing the language in the TPP and negotiating with the other nations involved.  Put another way, the operational arm of the multinational Wall Street corporations was writing trade agreements.   Can you see how the corporations were positioned?

On the Atlantic side, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was also coming next once TPP was finished.  It was not the U.S. government negotiating these terms, it was Wall Street and the Multinational Corporate and Financial establishment, via the Chamber of Commerce, writing these deals.   See the problem?

The leaders within BRICS could see the future of what this process would mean.  Everything is about the economics.  There are trillions at stake.

Additionally, the Word Economic Forum, the assembly of the multinational corporations in control of economics and trade, would now be dictating policy to NATO, the European Union, Central Banks, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and eventually the World Trade Organization (WTO).

BRICS could see that corporations would be in control of western government finance and trade, and as a consequence, when those same multinationals approached them for trade negotiations, the size of influence of the corporations would be, could be, too massive to fight.  BRICS assembled in 2009 to unite, defend and combat this problem.  This was their core mission, their commonality.

When President Trump was elected, for the first time since their assembly, BRICS saw a U.S. President with a completely different agenda.  Donald Trump was not in favor of multinational corporations running and influencing government.  Ideologically, as an economic nationalist, Trump was of the same mindset as the BRICS group.  

WATCH (1 minute):

Donald Trump: 'False Song of Globalism'

When President Trump took office, he literally tore up the TPP trade agreement that Tom Donohue had established, he kicked the U.S. Chamber of Commerce out of government, and he established his own trade negotiating teams to put government back in charge of trade policy.

President Trump took us out of TPP, withdrew from the Paris Climate Treaty, dropped TTIP, triggered NAFTA renegotiations, initiated tariffs against our economic adversaries (multinationals) and told NATO to start preparing to take care of themselves.  Trump was the first economic nationalist president in modern history.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Trade and Economic Advisor Peter Navarro took over from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  Trump established the economic and trade goals, the team worked the granular details, and ultimately Trump made the decisions, yes or no.

After Trump took this approach, the BRICS group essentially dissolved.

With the United States now confronting the WEF, NATO, the EU and all the multinationals (often called globalists), the BRICS team could pause their mission.

Factually, BRICS didn’t even meet during Trump’s term, because the U.S. trade and economic policy known as ‘America First‘, was essentially in alignment with the BRICS mission.

Unfortunately, it was the scale of the WEF, EU, NATO and multinational opposition to President Trump that eventually won.  All the multinational corporations, including Big Tech and ideological globalists in media, aligned to remove President Trump.  That was the scale of the opposition.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, literally just days after the election, the BRICS group was back on the phone planning to start meetings again in 2021 on the sidelines of the G20 summit.  The BRICS group are back together because the multinationals are back in control.

For obvious reasons, part of the BRICS agenda is to create a trade currency that is not the dollar.  With the recent sanctions put into place against Russia, we can see why that was always going to be important.

In many very direct ways, what we are seeing in this Russia -vs- Ukraine crisis is a geopolitical battle between the outlook of BRICS (economic nationalists) and the NATO, EU, World Economic Forum, multinational corporate assembly, i.e. economic globalists.

At stake in the Ukraine battle is the modern structure of the global economy and international politics.  This is why we see Joe Biden along with NATO, the EU and all of the affiliates under the control of the World Economic Forum going so hard against Russia.

EXAMPLE: India would not denounce Russia during the United Nations Security Council vote.  Now Biden retaliates.

• The Biden administration is looking whether to apply or waive sanctions on India for its purchase of the S-400 Triumf missile defense system from Russia, under Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA)
• Lu’s remarks came as India drew criticism from US lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, at a hearing on the “US relationship with India” for being among 35 nations that abstained Wednesday from a UN vote to rebuke Russia’s invasion. (LINK)

 

We already know which side corporate media, Big Tech, Hollywood and the social media control officer’s support.

Will the multinational corporations win, or will Russia with the ideological support of China, India, South Africa and Brazil be victorious?

If the World Economic Forum beats Russia, that tells me all I need to know.

…I’ll be joining the Amish.