“The era of liberal globalization is over. Before our eyes, a new world economic order is being formed”

Wow! How rapidly the wheel of fortune turns. It seems like only yesterday that a French Finance minister was touting the imminent the collapse of the Russian economy, and President Biden celebrated the Rouble being “reduced to rubble” – the collective West having seized foreign exchange reserves of the Central Bank of Russia; threatened to seize any Russian gold it could lay its hands on; as well as imposing unprecedented sanctions on Russian individuals, companies and institutions. Total fin-war!

Well, it didn’t work out that way. It scared the bejesus out of Central Bankers around the world that their reserves might be up for seizing too if they strayed from ‘the line’. Nonetheless, Team Biden’s hubristic decision to try again to collapse of the Russian economy (first ‘go’ was 2014) may yet come to be viewed as a major geo-political inflection point.

Its’ salience in geo-political terms may even ultimately equate to Nixon’s closing of the U.S. ‘gold window’ in 1971 – albeit, this time, with events pointing completely in the converse direction.

The consequences to Nixon’s abandonment of gold were nuclear. The petrodollar based trading system that was birthed from it allowed America to ‘nuke’ the world with sanctions and secondary sanctions – giving the U.S. its unipolar financial hegemony (after U.S. militarism alone, as the global order’s main support pillar, became discredited in the wake of the 2006 Gulf War).

Now, barely a month on, we see articles in the financial press that it is the Western financial system and world reserve currency that is in open decline, and not Russia’s economic system.

So what is going on?

The post-1971 system quickly evolved from being underpinned by a commodity – crude oil – to a fiat currency which is a “promise” to repay a debt obligation, and nothing more. A hard asset-backed currency is a guarantee that repayment will occur. By contrast, a one dollar of reserve capital is backed by nothing tangible – just the “full faith and credit” of the issuing entity.

What happened is that the fiat system began its demise when the Russo-phobic Washington ‘hawks’ stupidly picked a fight with the one country – Russia – that has the commodities needed to run the world, and to trigger the shift to a different monetary system – to a system that is anchored in something other than fiat money.

Well, the first ‘strike’ on the system – the sequellae to western financial war on Russia – simply was mayhem in commodity markets as prices soared astronomically. Russia is a global commodity super supplier, and it was being ring-fenced by sanctions.

Then early in March, Zoltan Pozsar, who formerly worked at the NY Fed, and was formerly an advisor at the U.S. Treasury and currently a strategist at Credit Suisse, published a research report in which he made the case that the world is heading to a monetary system in which currencies are backed by commodities, as opposed to being backed solely by a sovereign issuer’s “full faith and credit.”

As one of Wall Street’s most respected voices, Pozsar argued that this present monetary system worked so long as commodity prices oscillated predictably within a narrow band – i.e. not under extreme stress (precisely because commodities are collateral for other debt instruments). However, when the entire commodity complex is under stress – as it is now – the berserk commodity prices drive a wider ‘no-confidence’ vote in the system. And that is what we are witnessing now.

In short, the financial war on Russia gave the West an unmistakable lesson from Moscow that the hardest currencies are not USD or EUR, but rather oil, gas, wheat, and gold. Yes, energy, food and strategic resources are currencies.

Then arrived the second strike on the system: On 28 March, Russia announced that it was putting a floor under the price of gold. Its Central Bank would buy gold at a fixed price of 5,000 roubles per gramme – until at least 30 June (the 2^nd quarter end).

A price of RUB 100: 1 dollar imputes a gold price of $1550 per ounce, and a RUB/USD rate of around 75, but today a rouble exchanges at approximately RUB 84:1 dollar – (i.e. more roubles than just 75 are required to buy one dollar). Tom Luongo has noted however, that with the Central Bank buying gold at a fixed rate, this commitment gives an arbitrage incentive to Russians to hold savings in roubles, because the rouble is being ‘fixed’ at an undervalued rate relative to an over-valued open gold price (at approximately $1,936 per ounce, at time of writing).

In short, Russia’s Central Bank commitment sets in motion a dynamic to bring the Rouble back into balance with the current dollar price of gold on the open market. And ‘hey presto’, contrary to the European-U.S. effort to crash the exchange value of the rouble and cause a crisis, the rouble is already back at its pre-war level – and it is the dollar which has crashed (vs. the rouble).

But note this: Should the value of the rouble rise further vs the dollar, (say from 100 to 96:1) – as a result of Russia’s commodity trade strength – then the imputed price of gold becomes $1610 per oz. Or, in other words the value of gold rises.

But there is another wrinkle to this: Europeans are loudly protesting that Putin has insisted that ‘unfriendly states’ pay for their gas imports in Roubles (rather than dollars or euros) from 31 March, but Putin added the rider that the Europeans alternatively could pay in gold. (And other states have a further option to pay in Bitcoin.)

And here is the point: If fewer than 75 roubles equate to one dollar, buyers are getting oil at a discount when paying in gold. Maybe the big European energy majors will not be interested, but Asian traders will be keen to arbitrage and profit from the implied price differentials. And that, in itself, is likely to force the physical gold markets into a supply shortage situation, which again will feed through into further increasing the price of physical gold.

One less evident component therefore to European cries of pain (‘We won’t pay in roubles’), is that Central Bankers try to keep gold trading in a tight pattern (through manipulating the paper gold market as so not to rock the foundation of the global financial system).

But what the Russian Central Bank has just done is to wrest the gold ‘price-maker’ role away from the West, and its price manipulation. Between them, Russia and China can therefore effectively control the gold and oil price. Luongo concludes: ‘They are about to change the denominator in the global foreign exchange markets from the USD to gold/oil (commodity currency)’.

“Putin let the world down easy with this announcement. He could have walked right in and said 8000 roubles to the gram or $2575/oz and that would have broken the markets Friday going into the weekend, by selling his oil and gas at a steep discount” – thus forcing a rise in the gold price.

Neat, hey?

Ok, ok: bring on the chorus with usual tropes: Oh no; not another ‘de-dollarisation narrative! TINA – “There is no alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency”.

Fine. We all know that all gold at current valuation is far too small in total value to underpin a fully gold-backed trading currency or global trade. And, by the way, this is not about ending the dollar as an instrument of trade. No, it is about signalling a new direction of travel.

Pozsar’s argument is more subtle: A crisis is unfolding. A crisis of commodities. Commodities are collateral, and collateral is money, and this crisis is about the rising allure of ‘commodity-linked currency’ over fiat money. In periods of banking crises, banks are reluctant to play the inside game because they don’t trust fiat currency as a real collateral. They then refuse to lend money to their banking peers. Every time this occurs, the Central Banks have to print more money to “lubricate” the system enough so that it functions. This in turn, further devalues the fiat money, on which the system is predicated.

But if currency issued by Governments and printed by Central Banks is backed by hard assets, this problem is avoided. In this system, the counter-party to trade or financing transactions would have the option of demanding payment in the hard asset or assets backing the currency – most likely gold or possibly a pre-agreed upon commodity asset. Recall, fiat currency is nothing more than an unsecured debt instrument of the issuing entity – one which we have seen can be ‘cancelled’ at whim by the issuer – the U.S. Treasury.

This makes the ‘pay in roubles’ scheme more understandable too: Any workable “pay in roubles” scheme will have gas buyers going to Russian banks to sell dollars or euros or sterling to the bank, to have it buy roubles to tender to Gazprom. This will have the effect both of increasing the value of the rouble as a means of trade but may mitigate exposure to further financial sanctions by making Russian institutions the locus for payment operations.

As for the ‘direction of travel’? “After the current history of confiscation of dollar reserves”, Sergei Glazyev – supervising Eurasian Economic Commission’s planning for the monetary future – has said  bluntly: “I don’t think any country will want to use another country’s currency as a reserve currency. So, we need some new tool”. “We (the EEC) are currently working on a such a tool, which can first become a weighted average component of these national currencies”, he said. “Well, to this we must add, from my point of view, exchange-traded commodities: not only gold, but also oil, metal, grain, and water: A sort of commodity bundle – with a payment system based on modern digital blockchain technologies”.

“In other words, the era of liberal globalization is over. Before our eyes, a new world economic order is being formed — an integral one, in which some states and private banks lose their private monopoly on the issue of money”.

In January 2022, Harvard University published the results of a study: people over 65 who live near U.S. fracking sites die earlier than people who do not live in such a neighborhood. Fracking has been practiced in the USA for decades. Environmental damage is well known. But now, for the first time, it’s been studied: are people dying because of it?

The elaborate study was conducted by 10 researchers led by Longxiang Li at the School of Public Health at the elite Harvard University: Exposure to unconventional oil and gas development and all-cause mortality in Medicare beneficiaries. Completed July 17, 2020, the study was published Jan. 27, 2022, in the journal Nature Energy. As early as August 2021, the study had been presented at the annual meeting of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE). So anyone who wanted to know could know. The U.S. government and the German government and the European Union, which have now ordered much more U.S. fracking gas because of the Russia boycott.

2.5 million fracking well sites

The health data examined were those of 15 million (15,198,496 to be exact) U.S. residents over the age of 65 who receive health care from the federal Medicare program and live near fracking sites. These health data were compared to other U.S. residents in this age group who do not live in such neighborhoods. Because 95 percent of people over age 65 in the U.S. are covered by Medicare, the study has high validity.

Health data were collected at more than 100,000 fracking sites, for the years 2001 to 2015, where a total of about 2.5 million drilling sites operated. The sites are located in all major fracking regions of the U.S.: from North Dakota to New Mexico, in the east from New York to Virginia, and in the south between Texas and Missouri.

Fracking: Environmentally harmful – of course!

Unconventional oil and gas development: That’s fracking. It involves blasting open layers of rock at great depths under high hydraulic pressure using sand, water, chemicals and other additives. This allows gas and oil to escape and then be collected.

The fact that air, groundwater, rivers, lakes, drinking water, plants and animals are poisoned in the process and that people’s health is harmed – all this has been known worldwide for years, actually. Thousands of citizens’ initiatives, scientists, municipal councils have been organizing resistance for three decades between California and Wyoming – mostly in vain and politically-major media denied.

The study cites numerous studies that confirm these findings: Ambient air contains volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, and natural radioactive materials released by drilling. The drilling sites also emit organic compounds, chlorides, and suspended solids. In addition, methane gas also escapes uncontrollably during fracking: it is even more harmful to the climate than CO2. Known health effects include damage to pregnancies, the respiratory system, heart muscles and increased cancer – all of which have been known for a long time.

But not only harmful to the environment, but deadly

But the Harvard study asked for the first time: Does fracking also cause death? Answer: Yes: significantly elevated risk of all-cause mortality.

So fracking is not only harmful to the environment, it is also deadly to people. The closer they live to fracking well sites, the sooner they die. The increased mortality is 2.5 percent, but 3.5 percent in residences downwind of drilling sites. The study used 136 million (more accurately, 136,215,059) person-years – 2.5 percent of which would be about four million life-years that could have been lived but were destroyed by fracking.

Death rates are slightly higher in downwind than in upwind locations. This is due to the poisoning of the atmosphere. But that is just one of the causes of illness and death. The poisoning of water and soil, intensive truck traffic with diesel exhaust fumes, noise, continuous blinding lighting at night, etc. also play a role.

But what about fracking workers?

The study did not look at people under 65. There, too, there are “vulnerable groups,” such as babies or also – as in the case of the Corona virus – people with chronic diseases, which in the U.S. are known to begin in large numbers at an early age.

And another particularly important group has not been studied, and that is the people most directly exposed to the hazardous and toxic emissions: The workers at the drilling sites themselves, including the drivers who bring in and haul away the chemicals, auxiliary materials and vast amounts of water in pick up trucks and trucks. But fracking companies pushed through exemptions against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration OSHA, such as not having to shut down drilling rigs during repairs.

When asked, the head of the investigation stated: We haven’t studied that, and we don’t know of any studies on health and fatality impacts to workers at fracking sites.

And the climate and environmental movement in U.S.-led capitalism – Fridays for Future, Greenpeace, the UN, the European Union, the Greens – how dependent employees are doing, even in the companies directly relevant to the environment, such as the fracking industry here – big no-no.

Accelerated production

The fracking method was developed in the 1940s in the USA, especially by Halliburton. But it was not until around the turn of the millennium that production was accelerated on a large industrial scale: The U.S. wants to become independent of oil and gas imports. The big driver was U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, previously CEO of Halliburton. He enforced theat the fracking companies did not have to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act („Halliburton loophole“).

During the period covered by the study, from 2001 to 2015, fracking companies expanded the number of sites more than tenfold, from about 10,000 to more than 100,000. Thus, the study does not even take into account the acceleration of fracking, which accelerated again after 2015. This additional acceleration was triggered, among other things, by the construction of the Russian-German Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, which is opposed by the U.S. fracking industry and therefore also by U.S. governments, whether the president is Obama, Trump or Biden.

From 2015 to 2020, the number of fracking sites was increased to 160,000. Thus, from 2000 to 2018, the fracking industry increased production more than tenfold from 243 billion cubic feet to 3.61 trillion cubic feet. Exports to date go to 33 states.

More damage than recorded in the Harvard study

Thus, also in this respect, the Harvard study did not capture the full current extent of U.S. fracking.

The acceleration since 2015 has also been to drill even more wells at the same site than before: over 50 well sites at the same location (mega pads) are now not uncommon.

This also increases the amount and concentration of toxins in these sites, and thus the residences, beyond what was studied in the Harvard study.

High energy use: New and expensive fossil fuel economy

Not only is fracked gas environmentally harmful to produce, it also requires much more energy than traditional oil and gas production than, for example, in Russia.

And it’s not just production that requires more energy, but the entire rest of the supply chain: a high energy input is first used to liquefy the gas to one six-hundredth of its previous volume. Then comes the next high energy expenditure: the liquefied gas must be kept cooled to minus 162 degrees Celsius during transatlantic and transpacific transport.

And the construction of technically complex terminals also requires a lot of energy in addition to the raw materials, as do storage and regasification.

This additional, diverse energy input, along with the raw materials still needed for it (for extraction, ships, and terminals), represents a new and also expensive fossil fuel economy. The U.S. government is promoting the construction of new nuclear power plants, and the EU has now declared nuclear energy “sustainable.” The demand for coal is increasing – wind turbines and solar stations cannot keep up, also because the accelerated digitalization needs much more energy than before, for e-mobility, for clouds, for artificial intelligence in companies, hospitals, schools, universities….

Thus, the environmental policy of the EU and the USA turns out to be even much more harmful to the environment than the previous environmental policy, and also much more expensive, and finally deadly for people.

It is also an unspoken class warfare: companies purposefully locate sites near poor communities that are lower income and home to more people of color, the Harvard study notes. They are already weaker health-wise – and then add fracking to the mix.

Collective self-blinding

The EU and especially the German government are particularly “environmentally conscious.” They have established the new Western canon of values: ESG. E = Environment, S = Social, G = good governance. They all look admiringly to Harvard, for example the German Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach who studied here twice and then earned his second doctorate, at the Institute for Public Health and then at the Medical School – but eyes closed and through: Collective self-blindness.

At “Corona” they invoke the protection of “vulnerable groups” – but the vulnerable groups at the fracking sites – they are allowed to die mercilessly for the new gas.

They are in “good company”: according to the head of the Harvard study, all leading U.S. media such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have not reported on the study.

Environmental champion BlackRock in the U.S. government

Speaking of which: The U.S.-led capitalist West’s leading environmental and sustainability admonisher, Laurence Fink – he apparently doesn’t care about fracking deaths either. Fink is head of BlackRock, the largest capital organizer in the Western world, based in New York, and propagandist of the ESG canon of values. No word on the Harvard study from here either.

BlackRock has three high-level managers in President Biden’s U.S. administration. (1) For example, the former head of BlackRock’s sustainable investing division is now the administration’s chief economist. It is pushing fracking, now further spurred by the Russia boycotts.

And BlackRock & Co are not just the leading shareholders in the U.S. defense industry, currently clammily accounting for their profits from 20 years of war in Afghanistan. BlackRock & Co are also leading shareholders in the U.S. fracking industry, such as EOG Resources, Devon Energy, Tellurian, Cheniere, and the largest fracking equipment suppliers Halliburton, Schlumberger, and Baker Hughes. For the rising profits of BlackRock’s environmental champions, not only people in faraway Afghanistan are dying, but also their own citizens in the U.S. itself.

And the overzealous buyer of U.S. fracked gas, Commission President von der Leyen – with Biden she agreed to triple LNG imports – is taking advice on implementing the new canon of values ESG from none other than BlackRock.

Fact deniers, enemies of science. Transatlantically organized self-blinding with (multiple) fatal outcome.

(1) More detailed on BlackRock & Co. see Werner Rügemer: The Capitalists of the 21. Century. An Easy-to-Understand Outline on the Rise of the new Financial Players. 308 pages, tredition 2020, also as e-Book

It was something to behold. Dmitri Medvedev, former Russian President, unrepentant Atlanticist, current deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, decided to go totally unplugged in an outburst matching the combat star turn of Mr. Khinzal that delivered palpable shock and awe all across NATOstan.

Medvedev said “hellish” Western sanctions not only have failed to cripple Russia, but are instead “returning to the West like a boomerang.” Confidence in reserve currencies is “fading like the morning mist”, and ditching the US dollar and the euro is not unrealistic anymore: “The era of regional currencies is coming.”

After all, he added, “no matter if they want it or not, they’ll have to negotiate a new financial order (…) And the decisive voice will then be with those countries that have a strong and advanced economy, healthy public finances and a reliable monetary system.”

Medvedev relayed his succinct analysis even before D Day – as in the deadline this Thursday established by President Putin after which payments for Russian gas by “unfriendly nations” will only be accepted in rubles.

The G7, predictably, had struck a (collective) pose: we won’t pay. “We” means the 4 that are not large Russian gas importers. “We”, moreover, means the Empire of Lies dictating the rules. As for the 3 that will be in dire straits, not only they are major importers but also happen to be WWII losers – Germany, Italy and Japan, still de facto occupied territories. History does have a habit of playing perverted tricks.

Denial didn’t last long. Germany was the first to break – even before industrialists from Ruhr to Bavaria staged a mass revolt. Scholz, the puny Chancellor, called Putin, who had to explain the obvious:  payments are being converted into rubles because the EU froze Russia’s foreign exchange reserves – in a crass violation of international law.

With Taoist patience, Putin also expressed hope this would not represent a deterioration in contract terms for European importers. Russian and German experts should sit down together and discuss the new terms.

Moscow is working on a set of documents defining the new deal. Essentially, that spells out no rubles, no gas. Contracts become null and void once you violate trust. The US and the EU broke legally biding agreements with unilateral sanctions and on top of it confiscated foreign reserves of a – nuclear – G20 nation.

The unilateral sanctions made dollars and euros worthless to Russia. Hysteria fits won’t cut it: this will be resolved – but under Russia’s terms. Period. The Foreign Ministry had already warned that refusal to pay for gas in rubles would lead to a serious global crisis of non-payments and serial global-level bankruptcies, a hellish chain reaction of blocked transactions, freezing of collateral assets and closures of credit lines.

What will happen next is partially predictable. EU companies will receive the new set of rules. They will have time to examine the documents and make a decision. Those that say “no” will be automatically excluded from receiving direct Russian gas shipments – all politico-economic consequences included.

There will be some compromise, of course. For instance, quite a few EU nations will accept to use rubles and increase their gas acquisitions so they may resell the surplus to their neighbors and make a profit. And some may also decide to buy gas on the go on energy exchanges.

So Russia is not imposing an ultimatum on anybody. The whole thing will take time – a rolling process. With some sideway action as well. The Duma is contemplating the extension of payment in rubles to other essential products – such as oil, metals, timber, wheat. It will depend on the collective voracity of the EU chihuahuas. Everyone knows that their non-stop hysteria may translate into a colossal rupture of supply chains across the West.

Bye bye oligarchs

While the Atlanticist ruling classes have gone totally berserk but still remain focused on fighting to the last European to extract any remaining, palpable EU wealth, Russia is playing it cool. Moscow has been quite lenient in fact, brandishing the specter of no gas in Spring rather than Winter.

The Russian Central Bank nationalized foreign exchange earnings of all major exporters. There was no default. The ruble keeps rising – and is now back to roughly the same level before Operation Z.  Russia remains self-sufficient, food-wise. American hysteria over “isolated” Russia is laughable. Every actor that matters across Eurasia – not to mention the other 4 BRICS and virtually the whole Global South – did not demonize and/or sanction Russia.

As an extra bonus, arguably the last oligarch capable of influence in Moscow, Anatoly Chubais, is gone. Call it another momentous historical trickery: Western sanction hysteria de facto dismembered Russian oligarchy – Putin’s pet project since 2000. What that implies is the strengthening of the Russian state and the consolidation of Russian society.

We still don’t have all the facts, but a case can be made that after years of careful evaluation Putin opted to really go for broke and break the West’s back – using that trifecta (imminent blitzkrieg on Donbass; US bioweapon labs; Ukraine working on nuclear weapons)  as the casus belli.

The freezing of foreign reserves had to have been forecasted, especially because the Russian Central Bank had been increasing its reserves of US Treasuries since November last year. Then there’s the serious possibility of Moscow being able to access “secret” offshore foreign reserves – a complex matrix built with Chinese insider help.

The sudden switch from dollars/euros to rubles was hardcore, Olympic-level geoeconomic judo. Putin enticed the collective West to unleash its demented hysteria sanction attack – and turned it against the opponent with a single, swift move.

And here we all are now trying to absorb so many in-synch game-changing developments following the weaponization of dollar assets:  rupee-ruble with India, the Saudi petroyuan, co-badged Mir-UnionPay cards issued by Russian banks, the Russia-Iran SWIFT alternative, the EAEU-China project of an independent monetary/financial system.

Not to mention the master coup by the Russian Central Bank, pegging 1 gram of gold to 5,000 rubles – which is already around $60, and climbing.

Coupled with No Rubles No Gas, what we have here is energy de facto pegged to gold. The EU Chihuahuas and the Japanese colony will need to buy a lot of rubles in gold or buy a lot of gold to have their gas. And it gets better. Russia may re-peg the ruble to gold in the near future. Could go to 2,000 rubles, 1,000 rubles, even 500 rubles for a gram of gold.

Time to be sovereign

The Holy Grail in the evolving discussions about a multipolar world, since the BRICS summits in the 2000s featuring Putin, Hu Jintao and Lula, has always been how to bypass dollar hegemony. It’s now right in front of the whole Global South, as a benign apparition bearing a Cheshire cat’s smile: the golden ruble, or ruble backed by oil, gas, minerals, commodity exports.

The Russian Central Bank, unlike the Fed, does not practice QE and won’t export toxic inflation to the rest of the planet. The Russian Navy not only secures all Russian sea lines, but Russian nuclear-powered submarines are capable of popping up all over the planet unannounced.

Russia is far, far ahead already implementing the concept of “continental naval power”. December 2015, in the Syrian theater, was the strategic game-changer. The Black Sea-based submarine 4th division is the star of the show.

Russian naval fleets may now employ Kalibr missiles across a space comprehending Eastern Europe, West Asia and Central Asia. The Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, linked by the Don-Volga canal, offer a space of maneuver comparable to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf combined. 6,000 km-long. And you don’t even need to access warm waters.

That covers around 30 nations: the traditional Russian sphere of influence; historical borders of the Russian empire; and current political/energy rivalry spheres.

No wonder the Beltway is berserk.

Russia guarantees shipping across Asia, the Arctic and Europe, in tandem with the Eurasia-wide BRI railway network.

And last but not least, don’t mess with a Nuclear Bear.

Essentially, this is what hardcore power politics is all about. Medvedev was not bragging when he said the era of a single reserve currency is over. The advent of a resource-based global reserve currency means, in a nutshell, that 13% of the planet will not dominate the other 87% anymore.

It’s NATOstan vs. Eurasia redux. Cold War 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and even 5.0. It doesn’t matter. All the previous Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) nations see which way the geopolitical and geo-economic winds are blowing: the time to assert their real sovereignty is at hand as the “rules-based international order” bites the dust.

Welcome to the birth of the new world system. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in China, after meeting several counterparts from across Eurasia, could not have outlined it better:

“A new reality is being formed: the unipolar world is irrevocably becoming a thing of the past, a multipolar one is taking shape. It’s an objective process. It’s unstoppable. In this reality, more than one power will “rule” – it will be necessary to negotiate between all the key states that today have a decisive influence on the world economy and politics. At the same time, realizing their special situation, these countries ensure compliance with the basic principles of the UN Charter, including the fundamental one – the sovereign equality of states. No one on this Earth should be seen as a minor player. Everyone is equal and sovereign.”

In recent years, many people have become accustomed to thinking about the term “deep state” as something that only applies to the United States. While it is certainly clear that a fifth column has become increasingly embedded across all levels of America’s military, intelligence, bureaucratic, corporate, media and academic influence- very few westerners have any clear idea how this same structure has expressed itself in the nations of Eurasia.

Most relevant for the topic of this present report, we can take as an example the vast western-leaning hive of vipers, oligarchs and liberal technocrats which rose to power under the direction of the CIA during the dark years of shock therapy of the 1990s. Of course, since taking over from Yeltsin in 1999, President Vladimir Putin has gone far to purging many of those treacherous agencies that looted Russia during Perestroika, regaining control of vital institutions, bringing Russia’s military, scientific and intelligence powers back into national hands.

Speaking of this battle on December 9, 2021 at the Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, Putin stated:

“In the early 2000s, I’ve cleaned all of them out, but in mid-1990s, we had Central Intelligence Agency employees as advisors and even official employees of the government of the Russian Federation, as we learned later… There were American specialists sitting at our nuclear weapons complex sites, they went to work there, from morning to late night – they had a table and an American flag. They lived there and worked there. They did not need any fine instruments to interfere in our life, because they had control over everything already.”

Putin went on to describe the new CIA-run strategy of asymmetrical warfare utilizing foreign NGOs and rabble-rousing proxies (see: Navalny) within the vast “civil society” apparatus embedded within his nation:

“As soon as Russia started claiming its interests, started to raise its sovereignty, economy and armed forces’ capability, new instruments of influence on our internal political life became needed, including rather fine instruments via various organizations, funded from abroad.”

Of course while these operations have lit many weaker nations on fire in earlier days, the color revolutionary techniques used by the CIA-funded NED, or Open Society Foundations have resulted in very limited successes in Russia where saner heads have cut off many of these operations of funding while illegalizing Soros’ entire organization in 2015 declaring them to be “threats to state security”. Although Russia was 25 years behind schedule on this matter, banning Soros put them into the special club of nations that got their acts together led by China who had the wits to ban Soros in 1989, illegalizing his Open Society operations and arresting its agents (including CPC General Secretary and Soros agent extraordinaire Zhao Ziyang).

After recapturing key strategic interests from private clutches during his early years in power, Putin established a new set of ultimatums that he expected the liberal technocrats and oligarchs to adhere to: play by the rules set out by him or face the consequences. Some went to jail, and many went to London for sanctuary (often buying mansions with their ill-begotten gains in an area that came to be known as “Moscow on the Thames”). Still others stayed behind to play by the rules. Perhaps some did adapt to this new reality, but other forces continued to act as a fifth column- often keeping their claws firmly sunk into the levers of finance in Russia’s IMF-influenced central banking architecture and local regional power centers.

It was to these fifth columnists that Putin addressed his remarks on March 15 of this year saying:

“Yes, of course they [the West] will bet on the so-called Fifth Column. Our national traitors. On those who earn money here, with us, but live there. And they live not even in the geographical sense of the word but according to their thoughts. According to their slavish consciousness… many of these people, by their very nature, are mentally located exactly there, and not here. Not with our people. Not with Russia. This is, in their opinion, a sign of belonging to a higher caste, to a higher race. Such people are ready to sell their own mothers if only they were allowed to sit in the hallway of this very highest caste… They do not understand at all that if they are needed by this so-called “higher caste”, then they are needed only as expendable material in order to use them to inflict maximum damage on our people.”

The myopic habit of looking only at the USA or European fifth columnists undermining the sovereignty of nation states over the past decades while ignoring Eurasia, has caused many well-meaning people to presume falsely that nations like Russia or China can be treated as monolithic institutions with either a “good” or “bad” label attached to them. Such oversimplifications unfortunately result in minds susceptible to much misinformation, which there is no shortage to be found amidst our age of psychological warfare operations, media spin and narrative reframing.

Ignorance of the battle currently being waged between genuine nationalists surrounding Putin vs this other western-directed fifth column will ensure fatal errors in judgement and a misdiagnosis of our current crisis. Even worse, vital opportunities for broader policy solutions requisite to empower sovereign nation states will be lost and with this loss, any capacity to engage in proper combat with an emerging totalitarian world order will be destroyed.

Chubais Jumps Ship

One of the most blatant examples of leading Fifth Columnists who “sell their own mothers to sit in the hallway of this very highest caste” has been the figure of Anatoly Chubais who has recently announced his departure from Russia (hopefully permanently) in order to seek safer terrain in Turkey. In this leap into safer sanctuary, Chubais has abandoned his role as ‘Special Representative for Relations with International Organizations to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals’ at the UN.

Chubais played one of the most destructive roles of any living politician while working with the CIA-run Yeltsin government as a “Soros-young reformer” alongside Yegor Gaidar and other western tools who were recruited by the west to run the sacking and disintegration of Russia during the 1990s. Acting as Deputy Prime Minister for Economic and Financial Policy between 1992-96, Chubais oversaw the privatization of all strategic sectors of the Russian economy alongside Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, Rhodes Scholar Strobe Talbott, a coterie of sociopathic oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsy, Platon Lebedev and Boris Berezovsky (many of whom formed Chubais’ ‘Group of 7’ in 1996).

Chubais and Geidar pioneered the infamous “voucher system” which underpinned the multi-phased looting operation dubbed Operation Hammer by Bush Sr’s CIA starting in 1991. William Engdahl rigorously documented this dense period of privatizations which saw over 15,000 firms privatized between 1992-1994. New oligarchs like Berezovsky were able to use these vouchers purchased from starving Russians, to buy the oil giant Sibnet (worth $3 billion) for only $100 million and Khodorkovsky bought 78% of the shares in Yukos (a $5 billion value) for only $310 million. Soros himself bragged that he dropped over two billion dollars into Russia during this looting period.

Chubais had been an early founder of Perestroika clubs in St. Petersburg alongside such figures as Yegor Gaidar (future Prime Minister), Vladimir Kogan (future St Petersburg Bank President) and Alexei Kudrin (future Finance Minister). Upon Gaidar’s death in 2009, Chubais spearheaded the creation of the Gaidar Forum which was designed to take place one week prior to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos and served as a coordinating body of the deep state between the Schwabian technocrats and their Russian soulmates.

In 2013, Putin said of Chubais and his CIA handlers:

“We learned today that officers of the United States’ CIA operated as consultants to Anatoly Chubais. But it is even funnier that upon returning to the U.S., they were prosecuted for violating their country’s laws and illegally enriching themselves in the course of privatization in the Russian Federation.”

Despite Putin having clearly identified Chubais as a CIA asset, evidence of something very powerful protecting the financier was seen as he not only avoided being purged as so many others during Putin’s tenure, but even regained a large degree of influence as chairman of the executive board of the state-run technology company Rusnano from 2008 until 2020. During this time, Chubais also found himself serving as advisory council member of JP Morgan Chase, and the leading force behind decarbonization schemes in Russia driven by green alternative energy boondoggles which serve as a major component of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.

During his 12 year tenure, Chubais used Rusnano as an instrument to fund and seed windmill and solar power development, provided $400 million to Hevek Solar (Russia’s biggest solar energy company) and created a $520 million Wind Energy Development Fund.

Although Chubais’ offices at Rusnano were raided the day following the arrest of Russian finance minister (and fellow swamp creature Alexei Ulyokaev on November 16, 2021), his protectors ensured that while his days at the company would come to an end, he would avoid arrest, and go onto new destructive endeavors. What was his next assignment?

By the end of December 2021, it was announced that Chubais was made Russian Presidential envoy to the United Nations to coordinate Sustainable Development Goals. In this position, Chubais had shamelessly called for adapting Russia’s economy to the UN’s climate market and fully submitting to the dictates of the IMF and World Bank saying on January 8, 2022:

“I am convinced that the Russian climate market will be extremely attractive for international investment. So it is necessary to facilitate the access of Russian entrepreneurs to receive funding from abroad for alternate projects. To do this, it is necessary to achieve harmonization of the basic rules of the Russian Market being created in this area with leading international organizations- the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development”.

Not only has Chubais spearheaded the “greening of Russian energy” according to the Great Reset Agenda (which unites the two-fold manufactured crises of climate change and covid-19 into one package), but Chubais also used Rusnano to fund the growth of a foreign directed pharmaceutical complex within the heart of Russia. One major scandal emerged recently as Russian pharmaceutical giant and COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Nanolek received billions of rubles from Rusnano in 2020 and 2021 enriching the husband-wife duo of Tatyana Golikova and Viktor Khristenko (whose son is a major shareholder in the company).

While much can be said about other fifth columnists still embedded within Russia’s civil service and private sector, the smell of new purges is certainly in the air.

A Sea Change Now Underway

Powerful western forces representing the “higher castes” have severed ties with Russia and with those lost ties goes lost protection for many figures who have slept soundly at night despite their treacherous hearts. The World Economic Forum broke off ties on March 8  along with a multitude of foreign WEF partner corporations like Goldman Sachs, Deutschebank, Amazon, Visa, Paypal, Mastercard, Apple, IBM, Unilever, and Pepsico (to name a few).

Moves are quickly being made to empower nationalist forces to take increased control over Russia’s economy led by Sergey Glaziev’s new project to create a China-EAEU alternative financial/monetary system with increased national controls over finance and long-term planning. Gaining control of the financial sector which has long been under the strong influence of western oligarchical interests is vital if Russia is going to be able to not only weather the coming storm but come out of it with the economic sovereignty and power to build those large-scale projects needed for Putin’s aspirations for a Far Eastern and Arctic civilizational growth paradigm.

Although Chubais only represents but one large rat who has chosen this current moment to jump ship, others will certainly follow, and perhaps a new fear of god might awaken in the hearts of others who chose this moment of crisis to walk a more noble path as patriots of Russia as the world enters a new more multipolar future.

I think it is here fitting to end with a few remarks by President Putin who stated “the Russian people will be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths. I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges”.

The “rules-based international order” – as in “our way or the highway” – is unraveling much faster than anyone could have predicted.

The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China are starting to design a new monetary and financial system bypassing the U.S. dollar, supervised by Sergei Glazyev and intended to compete with the Bretton Woods system.

Saudi Arabia – perpetrator of bombing, famine and genocide in Yemen, weaponized by U.S., UK and EU – is advancing the coming of the petroyuan.

India – third largest importer of oil in the world – is about to sign a mega-contract to buy oil from Russia with a huge discount and using a ruble-rupee mechanism.

Riyadh’s oil exports amount to roughly $170 billion a year. China buys 17% of it, compared to 21% for Japan, 15% for the U.S., 12% for India and roughly 10% for the EU. The U.S. and its vassals – Japan, South Korea, EU – will remain within the petrodollar sphere. India, just like China, may not.

Sanction blowback is on the offense. Even a market/casino capitalism darling such as uber-nerd Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Poznar, formerly with the NY Fed, IMF and Treasury Dept., has been forced to admit, in an analytical note: “If you think that the West can develop sanctions that will maximize the pain for Russia by minimizing the risks of financial stability and price stability for the West, then you can also trust unicorns.”

Unicorns are a trademark of the massive NATOstan psyops apparatus, lavishly illustrated by the staged, completely fake “summit” in Kiev between Comedian Ze and the Prime Ministers of Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, thoroughly debunked by John Helmer and Polish sources.

Poznar, a realist, hinted in fact at the ritual burial of the financial chapter of the “rules-based international order” in place since the early Cold War years: “After the end of this war [in Ukraine], ‘money’ will ‎never be ‎the same.” Especially when the Hegemon demonstrates its “rules” by encroaching on other people’s money.

And that configures the central tenet of 21^st century martial geopolitics as monetary/ideological. The world, especially the Global South, will have to decide whether “money” is represented by the virtual, turbo-charged casino privileged by the Americans or by real, tangible assets such as energy sources. A bipolar financial world – U.S. dollar vs. yuan – is at hand.

There’s no surefire evidence – yet. But the Kremlin may have certainly gamed that by using Russia’s foreign reserves as bait, likely to be frozen by sanctions, the end result could be the smashing of the petrodollar. After all the overwhelming majority of the Global South by now has fully understood that the backed-by-nothing U.S. dollar as “money” – according to Poznar – is absolutely untrustworthy.

If that’s the case, talk about a Putin ippon from hell.

It’s gold robbery time

As I outlined the emergence of the new paradigm, from the new monetary system to be designed by a cooperation between the EAEU and China to the advent of the petroyuan, a serious informed discussion  erupted about a crucial part of the puzzle: the fate of the Russian gold reserves.

Doubts swirled around the Russian Central Bank’s arguably suicidal policy of keeping assets in foreign securities or in banks vulnerable to Western sanctions.

Of course there’s always the possibility Moscow calculated that nations holding Russian reserves – such as Germany and France – have assets in Russia that can be easily nationalized. And that the total debt of the state plus Russian companies even exceeds the amount of frozen reserves.

But what about the gold?

As of February 1, three weeks before the start of Operation Z, the Russian Central Bank held $630.2 billion in reserves. Almost half –

$311.2 billion – were placed in foreign securities, and a quarter – $151.9 billion – on deposits with foreign commercial and Central Banks. Not exactly a brilliant strategy. As of June last year, strategic partner China held 13.8% of Russia’s reserves, in gold and foreign currency.

As for the physical gold, $132.2 billion – 21% of total reserves – remains in vaults in Moscow (two-thirds) and St. Petersburg (one-third).

So no Russian gold has been frozen? Well, it’s complicated.

The key problem is that more than 75% of Russian Central Bank reserves are in foreign currency. Half of these are securities, like government bonds: they never leave the nation that issued them. Roughly 25% of the reserves are linked to foreign banks, mostly private, as well as the BIS and the IMF.

Once again it’s essential to remember Sergei Glazyev in his groundbreaking essay Sanctions and Sovereignty: “It is necessary to complete the de-dollarization of our foreign exchange reserves, replacing the dollar, euro and pound with gold. In the current conditions of the expected explosive growth in the price of gold, its mass export abroad is akin to treason and it is high time for the regulator to stop it.”

This is a powerful indictment of the Russian Central Bank – which was borrowing against gold and exporting it. For all practical purposes, the Central Bank could be accused of perpetrating an inside job. And subsequently they were caught flat-footed by the devastating American sanctions.

As a Moscow analyst puts it, the Central Bank “had delivered some volumes of gold to London in 2020-2021. This decision was motivated by a high price of gold at that time (near $2000 per ounce) and could hardly be initiated by Putin. If so, this decision can be qualified as very stupid, or even part of a diversionist tactic (…) Most of the gold delivered to London was not stored but sold and transferred into foreign currency reserves (in euro or pounds) which were frozen later.”

No wonder a lot of people in Russia are livid. A quick flashback is in order. In June last year, Putin signed a law canceling requirements for the repatriation of foreign exchange earnings from gold exports. Five months later, Russia’s gold miners were exporting like crazy. A month later, the Duma wanted to know  why the Central Bank had stopped buying gold. No wonder Russia media erupted with accusations of “an unprecedented [gold] robbery”.

Now it’s way more dramatic: RIA Novosti described the American-dictated freeze as – what else – a “robbery” and duly predicted global economic chaos.  As for the Central Bank, it’s back on the gold buying business.    

None of the above though explains some “missing” gold that de facto is not under the possession of the Russian Central Bank. And that’s where a somewhat shady character such as Herman Gref comes in.

Let’s check this out with State Duma deputy Mikhail Delyagin, who had a few things to say about the gold-exported-to-London bonanza:

“This process has been going on for the past year. Exported, according to some estimates, 600 tons. [Head of Russian Central Bank] Nabiullina said – whoever wants to sell gold to get cash, or if you mine gold and trade it, keep in mind that the state, in my person, will not buy gold from you at a market price. We will take it at a big discount. If you want to get honest money for it, please export it. The world center of gold trading is London. Accordingly, everyone began to export and sell gold there. Including Mr. [Herman] Gref. The head of the formally state-owned Sberbank sold a huge part of his gold reserves.”

Look here for fascinating details about Sberbank’s Gref shenanigans.

Watch for the gold-backed ruble

It may be a case of too little too late, but at least the Kremlin has now established a committee – with authority over the Central Bank nerds – to handle the serious stuff.

It boggles the mind that the Russian Central Bank does not answer to the Russian constitution as well as to the judicial system, but in fact is subordinated to the IMF. A case can be made that this cartel-designed financial system – implying zero sovereignty – simply cannot be tackled head on by any nation on the planet, and Putin has been trying to undermine it step by step. That includes, of course, keeping Elvira Nabiullina on the job even as she duly follows the Washington consensus to the letter.

And that brings us back to the ultra high stakes possibility that the Kremlin may have wanted from the start to go no holds barred, forcing the Atlanticists to reveal their true hand, and exposing their system in a “The King is Naked” spectacular for a worldwide audience.

And that’s where the EAEU/China new monetary/financial system comes in, under Glazyev supervision. We can certainly envision Russia, China and vast swathes of Eurasia progressively divorcing from casino capitalism; the ruble reconverted to a gold-backed currency; and Russia focused on self-sufficiency, productive domestic investment and trade connectivity with most of the Global South.

Way beyond its confiscated foreign reserves and tons of gold sold in London, what matters is that Russia remains the ultimate natural resource powerhouse. Shortages? A little austerity for a little while will take care of it: nothing as dramatic as the national impoverishment under the neoliberal 1990s. And extra boost would come from exporting natural resources at premium discount prices to other BRICS and most of Eurasia and the Global South.

The collective West has just fabricated a new, tawdry East-West divide. Russia is turning it upside down, to its own profit: after all the multipolar world is rising in the East.

The Empire of Lies won’t back down, because it does not have a Plan B. Plan A is to “cancel” Russia across the – Western – spectrum. So what? Russophobia, racism, 24/7 psyops, propaganda overdrive, cancel culture online mobs, that don’t mean a thing.

Facts matter: the Bear has enough nuclear/hypersonic hardware to shatter NATO in a few minutes before breakfast and teach a lesson to the collective West before pre-dinner cocktails. There will come a time when some exceptionalist with a decent IQ will finally understand the meaning of “indivisibility of security”.

By now what we may call a Triple Threat has been established as the catalyst anticipating the launch of Operation Z.

1. Ukraine developing nuclear weapons. Zelensky himself hinted at it in the Munich Security Conference.
2. U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine. Confirmed, tersely, by none other than the Sinister Cookie Distributor neocon wife in the uber-neocon Kaganate of Nulands, who described them as “biological research facilities”. ”
3. An imminent attack on Donbass with massive civilian deaths. It could have been in March, according to documents seized by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Or even in late February, according to SVR intelligence, which was monitoring the line of contact on a minute-by-minute basis. This is what eventually prompted Operation Z as a Russian version of R2P (“Responsibility to Protect”).

So after years of CIA-instigated shouts of “conspiracy theory!” and less than zero “fact checkers” activity, it turns out “it was all happening in Ukraine”, as divine messenger Maria Zakharova once again pointed out: “We have found your own products. We have found your biological material.”

The first-class investigative work of Dilyana Gaytandzhieva on Pentagon bioweapons was fully vindicated.

Based on documents received from Ukrainian biolab employees, the Russian ModD revealed that research with samples of bat coronavirus, among other experiments, were conducted in a Pentagon-funded biolab.

The purpose of all this research – which included another Pentagon project to study the transfer of pathogens by wild birds migrating between Ukraine and Russia and other neighboring countries – was “to create a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens.”

In trademark pysop mode, everything was turned upside down by the United States government: those evil Russkies could take control of biological samples, so any “accident” involving biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine would have to be blamed on Russia.

The White House, in yet another flagrant display of unredeemable stupidity, accused Russia of “false claims” and China of “endorsing this propaganda”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov came up with the adult perspective: “The whole world will be interested to know what exactly the American bio-laboratories in Ukraine were doing.”

Down on the ground

Meanwhile, defying the fog of war while being targeted by Kiev’s free distribution of weapons without any measure of control, civilians on the path of Operation Z confirmed over and over again that Azov neo-Nazis prevent them from escaping encircled towns and villages. These Banderastan fanatics are the shock troops transforming Ukraine into a large Idlib – according to His Master’s Voice’s plan.

Neo-Nazis are doing exactly what ISIS/Daesh did in Syria: hiding behind civilians taken as hostages. Azov are the white clones of ISIS/Daesh. After all they learned their tactics from the same masters.

They will be bolstered by a fresh contingent of 450 fighters just arrived from – where else – Idlib, including lots of non-Syrians from Europe and the Maghreb. Most though are al-Qaedites and members of the Syrian branch of the Turkestan Islamic Party. Their transit point: the Syria-Turkish border, a smuggling free-for-all.

As it stands, the most detailed macro-view of how strategic Operation Z is developing has been outlined here.  The inestimable Andrei Martyanov describes it as a “combined arms police operation”: a delicate crossover between formation-level warfare (“combined arms”) and a police operation to arrest and/or destroy criminals (the full extent of “demilitarization” and “denazification”).

For an undiluted, down and dirty, eye to the ground perspective (translated into English), it’s hard to beat Russian military man Alexander Dubrovsky. He stresses how the objectives of the operation are “strategy and tactics”; and proceeding with haste is out of the question in this “completely new page in the art of war.”

Cutting through the fog, no one could realistically expect any breakthrough out of the meeting between Foreign Ministers Lavrov and Kuleba on the sidelines of the Diplomatic Forum in Antalya – as much as Turkey may have played a constructive role.

The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything. The only tactic in town is stalling. Operation Z – or “the war” – could be stopped with a simple phone call from the Comedian in Kiev.

Lavrov at least was quite explicit on some key issues. Russia does not want war; never used oil and gas as a weapon; and wants Ukraine to be neutral.

The West, Lavrov added, refuses to understand the concept of “indivisibility of security”; those who supply Ukraine with weapons and send mercenaries should understand “they’re responsible for their actions”; and referring to the hysterical sanctions swamp, he stressed, “we will do everything to no longer depend on the West in any strategic sectors of our life.”

It’s quite enlightening to juxtapose Lavrov with clueless NATOstan “analysts”, totally ignorant of Eurasia and pontificating about “a new ideological conflict between irredentist tyrannies and liberal democracies”. It’s about sovereignty, stupid – not ideology.

NATOstan of course is incapable of understanding the process of Nazification of Ukraine – the key theme of any serious political/cultural/sociological analysis. It’s not an accident that the list of nations supporting the neoNazi-infested collapsed government in Kiev happens to largely coincide with the list of nations that refused to vote in favor of the UN resolution condemning the rehabilitation of Nazism.

In historical terms, these “analysts” might learn something by reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Bulgakov considered Ukraine as an avowedly reductionist version of “the steppe”: culturally barren, not capable of creating anything, destined to barbaric destruction. It’s important to remember that when Ukraine attempted to constitute itself as a state in 1918-1920, cultural and industrial centers such as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Luhansk had never been Ukrainian. And western Ukraine for a long while was part of Poland.

All aboard the Eurasian train

On the economic front, the dogs of hybrid war bark while the Eurasia integration caravan marches on – with the Empire irretrievably being pushed outside of the Eurasian landmass.

In a phone call prior to the Lavrov-Kuleba meeting in Antalya, President Erdogan suggested to Putin setting up a trading mechanism in gold and also rubles, yuan and Turkish lira to beat the Western sanction hysteria. The source is Abdulkadir Selvi, very close to Erdogan. No Russia-China official comment yet.

The key fact is that Russia, China, and for that matter the entire Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – responsible for at least 30% of global GDP and the bulk of the Eurasian market – don’t need the West at all.

As Peter Koenig, a former senior economist at the World Bank points out, “Western GDP has a different basis, with blown out of proportion services, whereas the GDP of the SCO and the Global South is production-based. A huge difference when one looks at the backing of currencies: in the West there is literally none. Eastern currencies are mostly backed by national economies, especially in China and soon in Russia too. That leads to self-sufficiency, and no longer reliance on the West.”

In the larger geopolitical spectrum, the non-stop war of attrition by the Empire against Russia with Ukraine as a pawn is a war against the New Silk Roads; Maidan in 2014 took place only a few months after the launching of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), then OBOR (One Belt, One Road) in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. It’s also a war on the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership. In sum: it’s an all-out war on Eurasia integration.

And that bring us to the key aspect of BRI: Eurasia rail/road connectivity – between China and the EU and with one corridor traversing Russia. The coordinated NATOstan sanction hysteria is not only against Russia, but also against China.

For the Beltway, BRI is beyond anathema: it’s almost like the Beast of the Apocalypse. As a response, the West even has concocted puny schemes such as the American B3W (“Build Back Better World) and the EU’s Global Gateway. Their impact, so far, does not even qualify as negligible.

Ukraine in itself is not a problem for BRI; traffic is only 2% of eastbound China-Europe freight trains. But Russia is another story.

According to Feng Xubin, Vice Chairman of the China-Europe Railway Express Transportation Coordination Committee, the freight settlement system between China and Russia may be in trouble: “At present, freight is denominated in dollars […] If the West cuts off Russia’s intermediate settlement channel in the international financial system, it means that the settlement system for freight charges between China and Russia will not be able to proceed normally.”

From the EU’s point of view, trade interruptions are not exactly a good deal. China-EU freight traffic increased over 100% last year.

For instance, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are co-financing a 67 km high-speed rail stretch from Istanbul to the Bulgarian border.

Sanctions on Russia will definitely affect the trans-Eurasia supply chain – on transportation, ports, insurance, communications. Yet quite a few sanctions may be revised later on, as the EU itself starts to feel the pain.

China will have an abundance of Plan Bs. The key northern BRI corridor remains China-Kazakhstan-Russia-Belarus-EU, but there is a possible detour via the Caspian, in Aktau in Kazakhstan. There will be extra incentive to fully link the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway with the Turkish grid. And there will be extra movement in the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), with Baku connecting to the Iranian Caspian Sea coast and by rail to ultra-strategic Chabahar port.

So we may be heading towards extra impetus for BRI’s multimodal southern corridor – bypassing Russia: that means a boost for Turkey, the Caucasus and the Caspian. And no losses for China. As for Russia, even if this re-routing may last for a while, it’s not such a big deal. After all from now on Russia will be developing intensive trade towards the east and south of Eurasia, and not towards the sanctioning West.

It was some twenty years after the end of the Vietnam war that a security conference was held between leading military figures from both America and Vietnam. Following the conference a U.S. Air Force General approached a Vietnamese General. The American had been a fighter pilot captain during the conflict, the Vietnamese general had been a Colonel in the N.V.A. The American asked (paraphrasing): “You have to tell me, we knew your Army was continually crossing the Mekong, we flew sorties up and down the river and could never find your bridges.” “I know,” said the Vietnamese, “we built them three feet under water.”

In that instant the American understood why America lost the war. His “Road to Damascus” moment was informed by how the different combatants approached problems. Had that been an American problem, how an Army crosses a wide, deep and fast flowing river, they would have solved the problem differently. They would have built a suspension bridge, they would have had bases on either side to protect it. They would have had Bowling alleys and Burger Kings and would have been flying in Bob Hope to entertain the troops. Why? Because they could, when you have resources they become the answer to every problem. The Vietnamese didn’t have resources, so they were resourceful.

And that, as the American realized, was why the Vietnamese won, and America lost.

The general may have learned a lesson, but if he told anyone, no one listened. Many of the same mistakes were repeated in Afghanistan, with the same results. Resources are not the answer to every problem. As with Americas war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, all resources do is obscure the underlying problem and present false, ineffective solutions.

War, and the threat of war is America’s solution to everything. To the man with the hammer, every problem is a nail. America does indeed have a formidable war machine. However, as with all machines it requires fuel to run it, that fuel is the U.S. dollar. Since the Bretton Woods accord at the end of WWII, America has had the privilege of possessing the world’s reserve currency. This enabled America to dictate to all countries outside the Soviet bloc how the global financial system would work. The so-called “free world” was anything but free, it was handcuffed by a system that effectively exercised control over their domestic economies.

In 1973 Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, much to the chagrin of the rest of the world. Despite protests no country was in a position to do much about it. Under its proxies, the IMF and World Bank, it enslaved much of the developing world and prevented it from post-colonial development. The resentment towards America and the weaponisation of its dollar resource should not be underestimated.

Iraq had resources, mainly oil, but what should have been a blessing for the country turned into a curse. Saddam Hussein decided to break from the petrodollar system and sell his oil in other currencies, we all know how that turned out. Similarly, when Ghadafi decided to sell his oil in the newly launched gold-backed dinar, it turned out badly for him and the Libyan people too. Both countries were deliberately destroyed, Tripoli, the once vibrant capital city of Africa’s most prosperous country, now has open slave markets. None should doubt how seriously America takes the subject of the dollar. These were lessons learned by national leaders everywhere. For those curious as to why America needs 1000 foreign military bases in more than 100 countries, that’s why, so no country attempts to stray from the dollar plantation.

The trillions of foreign debt owed by America was never intended to be repaid, just rolled over indefinitely. Fair to say, most countries understand that the monies they were compelled to invest in U.S. treasuries is a sunk cost, and they are not getting it back. With every turn of the printing press the dollar further loses credibility and the asset value of their holdings diminishes further. Every country is looking for alternative ways of doing business that don’t involve the dollar. China and Russia, China and Iran and China with many of its Asian neighbours have been using reciprocal currencies for several years. This amounts to trillions in trade that the Dollar is no longer a party too. Once this is understood it can help provide a context for current events.

Russia has complete control over its central bank and minimal foreign debt. It also possesses immense gold reserves. President Putin has wisely made Russia virtually “sanction proof”. Sure, the West can sanction a few overseas oligarchs, but who cares? Not the Russian people. Removing Russia from the SWIFT payment system will result in come short-term inconvenience, but alternatives are available. Both Russia and China have developed their own interbank payment systems and are now making them available to other countries who wish to by-pass the dollar altogether.

The use of the dollar as a weapon of war has worked well for America, until now. But when a country becomes overly reliant on its resources, it becomes a “one trick pony”, see Saudi Arabia. Stripped of oil, what kind of economy would the Saudis have? They wouldn’t have one at all. America stripped of its unique resource will be in the same position.

The dollar could crash any day, the government has long known this. A government-issued digital currency is planned to replace it. That may work in America, but few countries will want to entangle themselves in another American-dominated financial system. The resource is running dry, and American leadership shows no sign of any resourcefulness.

Interesting times…

A funny thing happens when corporate culture becomes indistinguishable from government culture. Corporatized governments promote and grant authority to those ‘ambitious’ individuals who can best over-sell and over-promise results. Think of unimpressive appointees like Trudeau, Ardern, Johnson, and Morrison.

At first glance it doesn’t really matter that these aims are unattainable. But it does matter, because from it we can crystalize this axiom: the more impossible the dream, the more it promotes the likes Ardern, et al.

As each one percent increase in unemployment sustained over a year creates some thirty-six thousand ‘deaths of despair’, a widely known and published fact, the shutting down of economies several years ago was going to cause millions of such deaths as initial unemployment rates in the U.S. alone spiked to nearly 15% according to Pew Research.

Ambitious leaders in league with the IMF/WEF were onboard with this, knowing full well the consequences. It was the pushback from popular ‘populist’ forces that prevented this early on, and in the U.S. a strong case can be made that the White House itself was on the side of these populist forces at the time, as it called for an opening of the U.S. economy and fought openly with governors from blue states.

But the eager-to-please misleaders in service of the IMF, for their part, would never approach any success without an entire cultural substrate. Narratives are a type of soft power, and like all forms of power, narratives can only go so far. We are now witnessing now just how far they can go.

Narratives are just ‘stories in our heads’. But if these are shared with broader communities, real or virtual/digital, then they are reinforced and become part of reality.

The WEF and the IMF it works for have a grand plan for the future – the technocratic aims of which are by now thoroughly understood. The WEF begins with these aims as a foregone conclusion, and so the only questions they wanted answered were ‘Who will carry it out?’, and ‘How will it be done?’

Whether or not it can be done (let alone, ‘should be done’) is not a question they are interested in. It’s a non-starter, because these things simply have to be done.

But this is a positive sign, is it not? The corporate culture of over-selling and over-promising investors and shareholders works in the public’s interest insofar as these catastrophically dystopian aims are far less stable or realizable than advertised.

In other words, the public has been resisting illegal legislation and shattering the narrative which justifies it, and so resetism itself is in danger of failure.

This much has meant the organic development of a counter-narrative, one that resonates with increasing layers in affected societies. Big tech oligarchs have done their part in trying to police, punish, and silence this counter-narrative.

Elites have fallen into a vicious cycle, as the populist counter-narrative is proven in part by that very censorship and repression. The more they push, the weaker they become.

Yet that point is so very well understood by Sorosian Color Revolutionary social engineers, planners, organizers, that one might raise some greater suspicion. It is indeed an axiom of Gene Sharp books like From Democracy to Dictatorship – A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (2012)and one of the most important points to make in popular organizing against ‘regimes’.

Each time the ‘regime’ attempts to make some ‘show of strength’, the counter-narrative prevails as mass publics understand that ‘shows of strength’ are derived from crises of strength and actual weakness.

Freedom, like love, come from places of strength. Dictatorship, like fear, come from a place of losing control. And power is like water, the more you grasp at it, the faster you lose it.

The absolute panic is palpable.

The Majority of People Trust Their Elites Less

One thing the WEF does by positioning itself as some independent watch-dog critic of a rapacious globalist oligarchy, when in fact it is employed by them, is demonstrate that they are ‘tuned in’ to how mass publics think and feel.

This is meant to subvert ‘tired’, ‘dated’, and ‘slow-to-change’ constitutional institutions.

Technocrats mean to show that by simple analysis of internet user data – their hopes, dreams, proclivities, political views and biases – they can arrive at top-down solutions which somehow reflect the user data.

They can then use state-of-emergency laws to enact these solutions into law, or into practice. So much of actual life takes place in the private sphere, that simple collusion and agreement between corporate chiefs on police is already enough to take the place of government and law. Elections are a cumbersome thing of the past, and – they reason – can be done away with.

As a managerial class, here they show the ruling class that because they so very well understand the ‘people’, they are capable of using an entire array of social sciences to achieve the desired result which they have over-promised and over-sold.

At the November 11^th 2021 WEF forum in Dubai, “The Great Narrative Meeting”, held in collaboration between the UAE government and World Economic Forum, which aligned with the announcement of the new book by Schwab and Malleret, The Great Narrative, (published December 28^th 2021), it was disclosed by panelist Ngaire Woods, Professor of Global Economic Governance at Oxford University, that global elites are now more trusting of each other than ever before, but that the people they rule over – nation by nation respectively – are far less trusting of their own rulers

Woods went on to say that one obstacle to governments’ Covid restrictions and climate measures in the coming years was that “the majority of people trust their elites less.”

Ngaire Woods, Professor of Global Economic Governance at Oxford University

“At Davos a few years ago [surveys] showed us that the good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more,” … “So we can come together and design and do beautiful things together.

“The bad news is that in every single country they were polling, the majority of people trusted their elite less. So we can lead but if people aren’t following we aren’t going to get to where we want to go.”

The WEF’s new release, The Great Narrative, with its fixation on fake news, is as much an admission of guilt as it is recognition of failure.

The sheer speed, magnitude and scope of the weaponization of Covid-19 to prop up a police-state in Western democracies was a demoralizing psychological operation, an act of political warfare not of nation against nation, but of elites against mass populaces.

This was an information warfare blitzkrieg. But without a decisive vernichtungsschlacht (battle of annihilation), they only left their own line of assault riddled with holes and supply-line issues. Nothing can hide a genuine lack of real preparedness as such displays of confidence. Of course, both their ability to succeed and their operating narrative seemed plausible enough when they launched their attack.

Now, these holes and supply-line issues are termed ‘Fake News’, and this frames the primary focus of The Great Narrative and is the real root of all issues admittedly discussed in the introduction (pg 12-19).

The rest of the thinking world understands instantly what this means: the WEF is calling for further censorship and repression of any alternative narratives.

And yet the hurried pace of the Covid-19 introduced Great Reset, and the way that a sizable portion of the populace has been able to expose it, reject it, and organize with some successes against it, also raises questions.

Was the Great Reset hurried?

What events forced the elites to make this happen now, instead of later?

What conditions would have been riper, and why were those conditions not fostered in advance?

As we have developed this so far in our work on the subject, it indeed appears that the Great Reset was launched with an insufficient foundation for reasons which expose the weakness of the plan. This seems to leave sizable room for the possibility that a notable split within the plutocracy now exists. This can be understood in terms of looking at the future possible outcomes in terms of the balance of class dynamics: billionaires are themselves stratified.

This stratification and conflict among elites is critical to understanding the present balance of forces.

Regardless of political orientation, the predominant error made among citizen-activists pushing back against Resetism is to resort to a default vulgar leftism in their interpretation of the motivations of the elite.

The error here is to project class solidarity onto the owning class. This error is easy to make for a number of reasons, and mostly because indeed the owning class does get behind many if not most of the upwards redistribution schemes which they all benefit from. But these moves tend to conceal or distort the real division which exist among them.

There are signs that their gambit is faltering and those developments were forecasted in our previous work on the subject The Globalist Dilemma: How to Implement a 4th Industrial Revolution Without Losing Power.

Chiefly, their plans were overly publicized, for reasons likely unavoidable given the number of governments, NGOs and organizations required to execute it. Despite their use of euphemisms and the language of human rights and economic development, those parts of the concerned public including lower-order elites, all could see what was really afoot.

In short, the public’s tolerance was misapprehended and through this, the public’s ability to wage a counter-offensive was possibly underestimated. Or conversely – and this also fits the bill –the position of the public to act in the public interest was accurately understood, but the plan had to go forward anyhow.

Either miscalculation would not in and of itself spell demise for the orchestrated Reset agenda.

The rate, volume, and type of upwards capital redistribution is a strong indicator of where the Great Reset agenda stands. But these move in a complex, non-linear fashion. And furthermore, what we can compare the changes to in a concrete sense, are changes over a preceding similar period of time. By that matrix alone, we can say there has been some ‘success’ in the Great Reset scheme.

But comparing this to what was really aimed for, what could have been if executed as it appears they had designed, presents another picture entirely.

A Great Reset in Crisis – A failure to Manufacture Consent

The Non Profit Industrial Complex was not deployed to soft-sell the Great Reset prior to its announcement. Instead, it came all at once, out of nowhere. And for those reasons, it was clumsily attached to their work-to-date (on climate change and poverty reduction).

Suddenly it seemed like a decade or so of propaganda was missing to connect these dots, between climate change, poverty on the one hand, and neuro-implanting and track and tracing the populace, on the other. That’s because there was a decade missing.

A gradual process of building support for the Great Reset, through manufacturing consent, (through building up these ideas through academia and the press, in popular culture and in media), could have been carried out.

The fact that it was not presents us with a contradictory set of postulates. The direct and brutal ‘honesty’ of the reset, in which the medium is the message (“do it because we say!”) makes it easier to combat. At the same time, it raises serious questions as to its timing and its method.

All together then, the release of The Great Narrative is all the more fascinating. This acts much like a sequel to Covid-19: The Great Reset, which itself served the role of narrative instruction. Intended as much for university students as for public relations agencies and politicians, in reading it one discovers all the errors and narrative points which failed to be useful, be related to actual events, and so on.

There is such a discrepancy between the narrative and predicted events in The Great Reset, and what has actually occurred, that we can understand all the better what The Great Narrative had to be written and released so hastily.

It will be an important research task therefore to compare the differences between these two texts.

Ever since the conclusion WWII, western elites have opted for a course of historical development on the foundation of ‘gradual reforms and change’. This, as opposed to the radicalism and rapid changes saw in the first fifty years of the 20^th century.

Many of the changes to the geopolitics of the world and Europe envisioned by the architects of the Third Reich are being implemented today by western elites, but these changes are delivered incrementally and slowly over a period of seven decades instead of seven years.

Through this, concerns can be addressed and cohesion in and among elites can be built. The rapid pace of changes seen in the first half of the 20^th century raised concerns, and caused divisions between western elites, and provoked a ‘histamine’ reaction from the populations in question.

When populations use social media to openly discuss the holes in the mainstream narrative, their comments and posts are called ‘fake news’. Fact checkers say so, even though a recent lawsuit against Facebook revealed through FBs rejoinder that Zuckerberg considers the views of the fact checkers to be merely opinions. “Facebook Quietly Admits Its Third-Party ‘Fact-Checks’ Are ‘Opinions’”

The need to openly talk about ‘narratives’ and combatting fake news as the WEF does, is itself a sign of the times and a sign of their own weakness. The Resestist narrative is crumbling, and lacking popular support they resort to an unstable repression.

Macron in a remarkably frank interview with a French Journal put his finger on the main structural problems facing the EU: He lambasted the fact that the EU Council (and other EU states) had vetoed the earlier French-German proposal for a Russia-EU summit. The consequences to this omission, he said starkly, was that: ‘Others’ were talking to the Russians on the behalf of the EU. It’s not hard to surmise that he is implying that U.S. ‘interests’ (whether directly or via NATO ventriloquism) were the ones doing the talking. And that ‘Europe’ had lost its voice.

This is not simply a case of wounded amour propre by the French Jupiterian leader. It is rather, that some West European leaders (ie. the Carolingian Axis), belatedly have awoken to the realisation that the whole fake artifice of the ‘imminent Russian invasion’ of Ukraine is about corralling European states back into bloc (NATO) discipline. Macron – to give him his due – showed by his remarks at the Moscow press conference that he understood that silence at this crucial moment could define Europe for the next decades – leaving it bereft of the autonomy (let alone any modicum of sovereignty) that Macron so much wants for Europe.

The account of Macron’s press conference after his long tête-à-tête with Putin represents the contortionism of a French President unable to explicitly diss the dominant Anglo-American narrative on Ukraine, whilst saying – in barely coded language – that he was at one with Russia on all its complaints about the failed European security architecture, and the real risks of its toxicity for Russia that could lead to war in Europe.

Macron explicitly said that new security arrangements in Europe are absolutely needed. (In spite of his care not to poke the U.S. in the eye, he was clearly signalling a non-NATO ‘new’ arrangement). He also flatly contradicted the Washington narrative, saying that he did not believe Russia had an intent to invade Ukraine. Adding that in respect to NATO expansion, mistakes had been made.

Macron, in short, came out at complete odds with the Biden narrative of imminent war. He clearly risks an outpouring of Anglo-U.S. and some European wrath for unreservedly taking on board Putin’s ‘not an inch’ stance of full Kiev compliance with Minsk, and a complete settlement for Donbass, as his own. The French President subsequently travelled to Kiev to shore up the ceasefire on the Contact Line. Predictably, the Anglo press is now hailing Minsk II as a weapon being held to the head of Kiev – precisely loaded to fracture the state and trigger a civil war.

Macron, from his comments, seemingly understands that the Ukraine crisis – through posing grave risks war inside Europe – paradoxically does not lie at the heart of the Carolingian fears.

Strikingly, China is saying the same explicitly: The authoritative Global Times in an editorial warns that the U.S. is instigating conflict in Ukraine in order to tighten bloc discipline – to corral European States back into the U.S.-led fold. No doubt, China makes the connection that Ukraine provides the perfect pivot for shepherding Europe towards America’s next stage of requiring a united front with the U.S. for the later task of barricading-in China, behind her borders.

In play, therefore, are key decisions that will define Europe for the future. On the one hand, (as Pepe Escobar noted some two years ago), “the goal of Russian and Chinese policy is to recruit Germany into a triple alliance locking together the Eurasian land mass à la Mackinder into the greatest geopolitical alliance in history – switching world power in favour of these three great powers, and against Anglo-Saxon sea power”.

And on the other hand, NATO was conceived, from the outset, as a means of Anglo-American control over Europe and more precisely for keeping Germany ‘down’, and Russia ‘out’ (in that old axiom of western strategists). Lord Hastings (Lionel Ismay), NATO’s first Secretary General, famously said that NATO was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.

This mindset lingers on, but the formula has acquired today a greater import, and a new twist: To keep Germany ‘down and price uncompetitive’ versus U.S. goods; to keep Russia ‘out’ from being Europe’s source of cheap energy; and to keep China ‘fenced out’ from EU–U.S. trade. The aim is to contain Europe firmly within America’s narrowly defined economic orbit and compelled to forgo the benefits of Chinese and Russian technology, finance and trade – thus helping towards achieving the aim of barricading China within its borders.

Largely overlooked is the geo-political import: that China, for the first time, is directly intervening (taking a very clear and powerful stance) on a matter central to European affairs. In the longer term, this suggests that China will be taking a more politically orientated approach to its relations with European states.

In this context, at the Biden and Olaf Scholz’s press conference in Washington this week – lit up, in flashing neon lights, for all to see – Biden literally bullied Germany into a commitment to scrap Nordstream 2 (should Russia invade Ukraine), reflecting Washington’s aim to keep Germany on the leash of bloc discipline. He effectively said that if Scholz doesn’t bin Nordstream, then he, Biden, would do it: “I can do it”, he underlined.

Yet, the moment he gives that undertaking, Germany’s little slice of sovereignty is gone – Scholz yields it to Washington. Moreover, Macron’s aspiration to some wider euro-autonomy is gone too, for without French and German policy alignment, EU ‘pretend sovereignty’ is gone. Moreover, if Nordstream is binned, EU energy security is blown away. And with little real alternative supply, the EU is nailed for good to expensive U.S. LNG dependency (with the likelihood of gas price crises at home, too).

It is not clear (and a likely source of anxiety for Macron), whether Germany’s refusal to give Biden his desired Nordstream ultimatum represents any meaningful reserve of Euro-sovereignty at all. What would happen were Washington to incite the Ukrainian militia ‘crazies’ into some outrage, or into a false flag attack that triggers mayhem?

Would Scholz be able to hold his Nordstream ‘line’ in the ensuing frenzy that the Anglo-axis would whip up? The little space which Macron has been trying to free-up in order to resolve the Ukraine crisis, would evaporate in the moment.

All this underlines what a narrow ‘line’ Macron is trying to walk: Were Schulz ‘to cave’ over Nordstream, Macron’s aspirations to re-shape Europe’s security architecture inevitably would be perceived in Moscow – though laudable – as hollow for their lack of any real European agency.

And in the Ukrainian particular, Macron’s room for manoeuvre to prevent a war in Europe would be attenuated, since only by Macron (backed by the EU), acting in lockstep with Putin, would there be a chance to compel Kiev to implement Minsk II.

The list of Macron’s challenges do not end there: France has the EU rotating Presidency, but EU foreign policy requires unanimity amongst member-states. Can he get that? Will Team Biden become so angered at France playing the maverick, that Washington resolves to stick a spanner in Macron’s works?

Biden needs a foreign policy achievement for his campaign into the Midterms. And 63% of Americans say they would support massive sanctions imposed on Russia, were Moscow to invade Ukraine. Biden is known to believe in the adage that ultimately all politics – including foreign policy – is subservient to domestic electoral needs. Heavily sanctioning Russia – with Europe acting in lockstep – is just the step that would likely be seen in the White House as giving his ratings a needed fillip. (And not unprecedented: Recall Bill Clinton, under pressure over the Lewinsky exposé, triggered the Balkan war to distract from his personal predicament).

Not surprisingly, President Putin is cautious. Is Macron, who says he has consulted widely, speaking for the EU? And most important of all, where does Washington stand in this?

The most significant point to grasp from the Putin–Macron episode is that it gave the lie to the idea that Moscow is somehow hoping to open negotiations with the West on secondary issues, as a possible gateway to Russia’s existential concerns. Russia is open to negotiations, but only in respect to Putin’s three red lines: No NATO (including stealth NATO) in Ukraine; no strike missiles on Russia’s border; and the roll-back of NATO to the lines of 1997. Putin did not give an inch on the latter; he gave not an inch either on Minsk as the only solution in Ukraine. Putin did not give at all the impression of a man liking negotiating for the sake of negotiating.

Bottom line: No easy fixes. Even if conflict is frozen or paused over the short term, it will not hold longer-term, as the West refuses to acknowledge that Putin means what he says. This likely will only change through the sides’ experience of pain. The West, for now, sits sanguine in the belief that it has escalatory preponderance in the application of pain. We’ll see how true that proves to be.

It seems reasonable to expect we will have this crisis with us – in its various forms – for at least the next two years. These political initiatives mark but the start of a drawn-out, high-stakes, phase of a Russian effort to shift the European security architecture into a new form which the West presently rejects. The Russian aim will be to keep the pressures, and even the latency, of war ever-present, in order to harass war-averse Western leaders to make this necessary shift.

As the old joke says: capitalism’s centuries are numbered. Everybody knows that Marx’s millenarian predictions went wrong: the New Man didn’t come, and we are still here in a world divided between the haves and have nots, as Hemingway titled his most social novel. But the Western economy’s contradictions are indeed stronger than ever. Take the recent World Economic Forum Global Risks Report. It draws on the views of over 12000 country-level leaders: after two years of the pandemic, the most perceived medium-term risk for societies are “social cohesion erosion“, “livelihood crisis”, and “mental health deterioration”.

Notably, “Social cohesion erosion is a top short-term threat in 31 countries — including Argentina, France, Germany, Mexico and South Africa from the G20”. In the long term, the threat of “involuntary migration” lurks. The majority of the people interviewed judge the efforts to contain or regulate migration and refugee waves as absolutely inconsistent.

You can argue that Davos is “about rich men arriving on private planes to discuss climate change, sexism and inequality” and “most of its predictions are worthless”, as Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times. But the reality that our societies are crumbling away before of our eyes is difficult to deny. Instead, the Davos paradox is whether the very elites that create these problems are able or only willing to solve them.

WEF report says that by 2030, 51 more million people are projected to live in extreme poverty compared to the pre-pandemic trend. “Income disparities exacerbated by an uneven economic recovery risk increasing polarisation and resentment within societies”. In the U.S., these divisions are taking a unique and disruptive form. A recent poll in the United States found “division in the country” to be voters’ top concern: they expected it to worsen in 2022. The attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 was one clear sign of the instability that political polarisation risks may create.

You can call it a democracy’s crisis. The Western system, largely symbolic and confined to the theatrical moment of the ballots, seems no more capable of answering the people’s fears. The impact of migration on Western countries is fated to grow dramatically. Davos’ gurus are not reassuring. In the following years: “A bifurcated recovery is likely to prompt an upsurge in economic migration. At the same time, worsening extreme weather and rise in political instability, state fragility and civil conflict, are likely to further swell refugees numbers”.

While in the West, ordinary people were receiving the vaccine booster against COVID-19, the super-rich’s richness was boosted by the circumstances created by the same virus. It is the conclusion of the recent Oxfam report “Inequality Kills: the unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19”. “A new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began — the document says — The world’s 10 richest men have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are projected to have been pushed into poverty. Meanwhile, an estimated 17 million people have died from COVID-19—a scale of loss not seen since the Second World War. These issues are all part of the same, deeper malaise. It is that inequality is tearing our societies apart”.

Everywhere the same sad music. The perception of social decay is faced with mild desperation or the neoliberal choir’s same old song: “there is no alternative”. But, as Noam Chomsky said, in a 2021 interview on Jacobin Magazine, the corporate sector is “running scared”. “They’re concerned with what they call “reputational risks,” meaning “the peasants are coming with their pitchforks.” All across the corporate world — at Davos, and at the Business Roundtable — there are discussions of how “We have to confess to the public that we’ve done the wrong things. We haven’t paid enough attention to stakeholders, workforce, and community, but now we realise our errors. Now we’re becoming what, in the 1950s, was called ’soulful corporations,’ really dedicated to the common good.”

Indeed, the corporate world needs a new mammoth global PR campaign. The Green Economy is ready to be just another example of commodification of every life’s aspect and not the beginning of a more human business’ era. The electric automotive big new frontier rush is not bound to really reduce the global pollution but only to open a new market with many environmental unsolved questions. A ridiculous result of this neoliberal “Greenwashing” wave is the European plans to allow gas and nuclear to be labelled as “green” investments. You can see here Western democracies’ crisis in action: instead of confronting the challenges, they change the meaning of the words.

It is not a surprise that the Edelman Trust Barometer 2022 found a world “ensnared in a vicious cycle of distrust, fuelled by a growing lack of faith in media and government. Through disinformation and division, these two institutions are feeding the cycle and exploiting it for commercial and political gain”.

The Edelman’s Barometer has been polling the world’s nations for years on trust in their governments, media, business and NGO. Today it says that “anger wins the clicks”, creating a “government-media distrust spiral”.

“The public has become widely aware that the media does not play it straight”. “We really have a collapse of trust in democracies,” said Reuters Richard Edelman, whose communications group published the survey of over 36,000 respondents in 28 countries interviewed between Nov. 1-24 of last year. The biggest losers of trust over the previous year were institutions in Germany, down 7 points to 46, Australia at 53 (-6), the Netherlands at 57 (-6), South Korea at 42 (-5) and the United States at 43 (-5). Russia wins the palm of the more sceptical nation. The very fact that countries not famous for their democracy, like China, United Arab Emirates and Thailand, are at the top of the trust’s index may show that their citizens do not share so much the faith in Western’s democratic ideals. They value more a “sense of predictability about policy” a “coherence” among the national leaders that the Western public seems to lack at all. China shows a staggering 83% public trust in institutions. Definitely, optimism about the future lies more in the East than in the West.

The Davos report rightly stresses that our world needs more than ever a “global governance and a more effective international risk mitigation” not only for the Covid’s threat but also to cope with “geo-economic confrontation”. Unfortunately, the numbers are telling a different story. The main characters of the global game are dealing mostly unprepared with the contradictions of the future world. Weak governments of divided European countries face geopolitical crises, as the Ukrainian one, trapped in the old American imperial scheme, entirely against their national interest. The West needs a “colour” revolution, not the East.