By Jessica CORBETT

An analysis released Tuesday by a trio of groups highlights how Big Oil has cashed in on various crises over the past year—including the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the global climate emergency—while enriching wealthy shareholders.

“Big Oil is living the second half of their unspoken mantra ‘socialize losses, privatize gains.'”

The new report from BailoutWatch, Friends of the Earth, and Public Citizen explains that there are two main tactics that fossil fuel giants use to benefit investors: “First, they repurchase shares of their own stock and retire them, reducing the number of shares outstanding and driving up the value of each share remaining in investors’ hands.”

“Second, they increase dividends, the quarterly payments investors receive for owning shares,” the report continues. “Oil and gas dividends, historically bigger than other sectors’, have spiked in recent months, outstripping every other industry group.”

“Amid high gas prices and war in recent months, oil and gas companies have kicked both tactics into overdrive,” the groups found, based on reviewing public statements and securities filings from the 20 largest U.S.-headquartered fossil fuel corporations.

During the first two months of 2022, “seven companies’ boards authorized their corporate treasuries to buy back and retire $24.35 billion in stock—a 15% increase over all of the buybacks authorized in 2021,” the report states. “Six of those decisions came in February 2022, after Russian warmongering lifted stock prices. The total since the start of 2021 is $45.6 billion.”

The analysis also reveals that in January and February, 11 companies raised their dividends—”often extravagantly”—and notes that “nine were increases of more than 15% and four were increases of more than 40%.”

“Six companies have begun paying additional dividends on top of their routine quarterly payments, including by implementing new variable dividends based on company earnings—a way of directing windfall profits immediately into private hands without any possibility of investment, employee benefits, or other uses,” the document points out.

“So far in 2022, these companies have started paying out an initial $3 billion in special windfall dividends,” the report adds. “Four of these companies—Pioneer, Chesapeake, Conoco, and Coterra—announced variable dividends beginning August 2021, as prices began to rise.”

Chris Kuveke of BailoutWatch said in a statement that “Big Oil is living the second half of their unspoken mantra ‘socialize losses, privatize gains.'”

“Two years after winning multi-billion dollar bailouts from the Trump administration, these newly flush companies are pocketing billions from an international crisis, and they don’t care how it affects regular Americans,” Kuveke added.

As Public Citizen researcher Alan Zibel put it: “Big Oil executives are reaping windfall profits while accelerating the climate crisis and sticking consumers with the bill.”

Zibel also acknowledged efforts to blame President Joe Biden for rising prices, rather than industry profiteering.

“The oil industry and their allies on Capitol Hill falsely claim that the Biden administration’s acceptance of mainstream climate science is stifling investment in the domestic oil industry,” he said. “But the industry’s actions show that they are intently focused on funneling cash to their shareholders rather than lowering prices for consumers.”

According to Lukas Ross, climate and energy program manager at Friends of the Earth: “This is a master class in war profiteering. Oil and gas companies are feeding off humanitarian disaster and consumer suffering in order to reward Wall Street.”

“Oil companies drove us into a climate crisis and are now price gouging us to extinction,” he warned. “Congress and President Biden must take action by passing a windfall profits tax to rein in Big Oil’s cash grab.”

The new analysis follows the introduction of multiple bills targeting Big Oil’s windfall profits, including a proposal spearheaded by Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) designed to crack down on such behavior in all sectors, not just the fossil fuel industry.

Sanders on Tuesday morning held a hearing to call out how corporate greed and profiteering are fueling inflation. During his opening remarks, the chair took aim at Big Oil specifically while listing some examples.

“Yesterday, at a time when gasoline in America is now at a near-record high at $4.17 a gallon, guess what?” Sanders said. “ExxonMobil reported that its profit from pumping oil and gas alone in the first quarter will likely hit a record high of $9.3 billion.”

“Meanwhile,” he added, “Big Oil CEOs are on track to spend $88 billion this year not to decrease supply constraints, not to address the climate crisis, but to buy back their own stock and hand out dividends to enrich their wealthy shareholders.”

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations plans to hold a hearing Wednesday titled “Gouged at the Gas Station: Big Oil and America’s Pain at the Pump.” Top executives from BP America, Chevron, Devon Energy, ExxonMobil, Pioneer Natural Resources, and Shell USA are set to appear before the panel.

commondreams.org

“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”.

By Pepe ESCOBAR

Saddam, Gaddafi, Iran, Venezuela – they all tried but couldn’t do it. But Russia is on a different level altogether.

The beauty of the game-changing, gas-for-rubles, geoeconomic jujitsu applied by Moscow is its stark simplicity.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s presidential decree on new payment terms for energy products, predictably, was misunderstood by the collective west. The Russian government is not exactly demanding straightforward payment for gas in rubles. What Moscow wants is to be paid at Gazprombank in Russia, in its currency of choice, and not at a Gazprom account in any banking institution in western capitals.

That’s the essence of less-is-more sophistication. Gazprombank will sell the foreign currency – dollars or euros – deposited by their customers on the Moscow Stock Exchange and credit it to different accounts in rubles within Gazprombank.

What this means in practice is that foreign currency should be sent directly to Russia, and not accumulated in a foreign bank – where it can easily be held hostage, or frozen, for that matter.

All these transactions from now on should be transferred to a Russian jurisdiction – thus eliminating the risk of payments being interrupted or outright blocked.

It’s no wonder the subservient European Union (EU) apparatus – actively engaged in destroying their own national economies on behalf of Washington’s interests – is intellectually unequipped to understand the complex matter of exchanging euros into rubles.

Gazprom made things easier this Friday, sending official notifications to its counterparts in the west and Japan.

Putin himself was forced to explain in writing to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz how it all works.

Once again, very simple: Customers open an account with Gazprombank in Russia. Payments are made in foreign currency – dollars or euros – converted into rubles according to the current exchange rate, and transferred to different Gazprom accounts.

Thus it is 100 percent guaranteed that Gazprom will be paid.

That’s in stark contrast to what the United States was forcing the Europeans to do: pay for Russian gas in Gazprom accounts in Europe, which would then be instantly frozen. These accounts would only be unblocked with the end of Operation Z, Russia’s military ops in Ukraine.

Yet the Americans want the war to go on indefinitely, to “bog down” Moscow as if this was Afghanistan in the 1980s, and have strictly forbidden the Ukrainian Comedian in front of a green screen somewhere – certainly not Kiev – to accept any ceasefire or peace deal.

So Gazprom accounts in Europe would continue to be frozen.

As Scholz was still trying to understand the obvious, his economic minions went berserk, floating the idea of nationalizing Gazprom’s subsidiaries – Gazprom Germania and Wingas – in case Russia decides to halt the gas flow.

This is ridiculous. It’s as if Berlin functionaries believe that Gazprom subsidiaries produce natural gas in centrally heated offices across Germany.

The new rubles-for-gas mechanism does not in any way violate existing contracts. Yet, as Putin warned, existing contracts may indeed be stopped: “If such [ruble] payments are not made, we will consider this to be the buyers’ failure to perform commitments with all ensuing implications.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov was adamant that the mechanism will not be reversed under the current, dire circumstances. Still that does not mean that the gas flow would be instantly cut off. Payment in rubles will be expected from ‘The Unfriendlies’ – a list of hostile states that includes mostly the US, Canada, Japan and the EU – in the second half of April and early May.

For the overwhelming majority of the Global South, the overarching Big Picture is crystal clear: an Atlanticist oligarchy is refusing to buy the Russian gas essential to the wellbeing of the population of Europe, while fully engaged in the weaponization of toxic inflation rates against the same population.

Beyond Rublegas

This gas-for-rubles mechanism – call it Rublegas – is just the first concrete building block in the construction of an alternative financial/monetary system, in tandem with many other mechanisms: ruble-rupee trade; the Saudi petroyuan; the Iran-Russia SWIFT- bypassing mechanism; and the most important of all, the China-Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) design of a comprehensive financial/monetary system, with the first draft to be presented in the next few days.

And all of the above is directly linked to the stunning emergence of the ruble as a new, resource-based reserve currency.

After the predictable initial stages of denial, the EU – actually, Germany – must face reality. The EU depends on steady supplies of Russian gas (40 percent) and oil (25 percent). The sanction hysteria has already engineered certified blowback.

Natural gas accounts for 50 percent of the needs of Germany’s chemical and pharmaceutical industries. There’s no feasible replacement, be it from Algeria, Norway, Qatar or Turkmenistan. Germany is the EU’s industrial powerhouse. Only Russian gas is capable of keeping the German – and European – industrial base humming and at very affordable prices in case of long-term contracts.

Disrupt this set up and you have horrifying turbulence across the EU and beyond.

The inimitable Andrei Martyanov has summed it up this way: “Only two things define the world: the actual physical economy, and military power, which is its first derivative. Everything else are derivatives but you cannot live on derivatives.”

The American turbo-capitalist casino believes its own derivative “narrative” – which has nothing to do with the real economy. The EU will eventually be forced by reality to move from denial to acceptance. Meanwhile, the Global South will be fast adapting to the new paradigm: the Davos Great Reset has been shattered by the Russian Reset.

thecradle.co

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.”

By Pepe ESCOBAR

By Joe LAURIA

The United States is setting up China as a second target of its intense economic war against Russia in what could have cataclysmic effects on the world economy, including the West.

The U.S. could not impose the most stringent sanctions on Moscow without the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now the U.S. is trying to link China to the war.

Washington’s move to frame Beijing emerged Monday when unnamed U.S. officials told its allies that Russia had asked China for military aid in Ukraine. Reuters reported: “The message, sent in a diplomatic cable and delivered in person by intelligence officials, also said China was expected to deny those plans, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”  China indeed denied it.

Importantly, Reuters added: “The U.S. government offered no public evidence to back its assertions of China’s willingness to provide such aid to Russia.”

On that same day Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, led a delegation to Rome to meet with Yang Jiechi, a member of the Chinese politburo. After the meeting, an unnamed senior U.S. official in Rome told reporters: “We have deep concerns about China’s alignment with Russia at this time, and the national security adviser was direct about those concerns and the potential implications and consequences of certain actions.”

The next day NATO Secretary-General Jen Stoltenberg remarked:

“China should join the rest of the world condemning strongly the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia. So China has an obligation as a member of the U.N. Security Council to actually support and uphold international law. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a blatant violation of international law so we call on [China] to clearly condemn the invasion and of course not support Russia. And we are closely monitoring any signs of support from China to Russia.”

The English-language, government-owned, Chinese newspaper Global Times accused Stoltenberg of trying to accuse China of being an “accomplice” with Russia in Ukraine and dismissed NATO as a “puppet” of the United States.

After these statements it seemed clear the U.S. was trying to lay the groundwork for a truly reckless idea: to tie China to the war so it could sanction it perhaps along the lines of what the West has already laid on Russia.

Then on Thursday U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spelled it out: “We believe China in particular has a responsibility to use its influence with President Putin and to defend the international rules and principles that it professes to support. Instead, it appears that China is moving in the opposite direction by refusing to condemn this aggression, while seeking to portray itself as a neutral arbiter.” He added: “We will not hesitate to impose costs.”

In retrospect, evidence that the U.S. is trying to open a second front in its economic war first surfaced just before Russia intervened in Ukraine’s civil war, when Blinken implored China to stop Russia from invading. It was portrayed in Western media as a desperate last chance at peace from a concerned United States.

Of course China rebuffed Blinken. It seemed like a ridiculous gambit at the time. But in hindsight it may well have been the first U.S. step in constructing a case for sanctions against China. It allows Washington to say China was given every opportunity to try to stop the invasion and failed to do so and therefore was somehow complicit.

Biden Threatens Xi

President Xi during his summit with Biden on Friday. (Chinese FM)

All this was preparation for President Joe Biden’s video-call on Friday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in which Biden warned Chinese President Xi Jinping not to help Russia’s war effort in Ukraine or there would be “consequences” to pay.

Biden “detailed the implications and consequences” if Beijing were to give “material support to Russia” in the war, the White House said in a readout. While the White House didn’t spell out what those consequences would be, it said Biden went into detail about the severe sanctions the U.S. had imposed on Russia, including on its central bank and a number of imports, including oil. In other words, he read China the riot act. Biden was in essence threatening Xi with similar sanctions if China helped Russia.

Xi, however, warned Biden that the U.S. sanctions on Russia could trigger a worldwide economic crisis, apparently implying that the crisis would be far worse if the sanctions were extended to China.  Commodities prices, especially in energy and food, have already soared.

China is the world’s second largest economy and its biggest exporter. The U.S. imported $506 billion in Chinese goods in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Department, an amount that would be extremely difficult for the US to replace. China also owns $1.05 trillion in Treasury securities, the second most after Japan. It could not be easily cut off from the Western financial system as Russia has been.

Before the summit on Friday, Global Times wrote in an editorial: “The close relationship between China and Russia has been a thorn in the US’ side, especially against the backdrop of the ongoing Ukraine crisis. With the simmering of the situation, it couldn’t be any clearer that Washington is eager to exploit the Russia-Ukraine conflict to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow.”

The U.S. recognizes that its economic war against Russia could well fail because of the close and expanding economic and financial ties between Moscow and Beijing. But it is too late for the United States.

Since the invasion, China is buying more oil and other commodities from Russia, Beijing has allowed Russia to use its Union Pay banking system, replaced Russia’s use of SWIFT with China’s Interbank System (CIPS), and China and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), which Russia is a part of, are designing a new monetary and financial system that would bypass the U.S. dollar, threatening it as the world’s reserve currency.

Can you help me fight your friend so that I can concentrate on fighting you later?

— CGTN LIU Xin ?? (@LiuXininBeijing) March 19, 2022

The Global Times added:  “It’s the US that should put out the fire it lit in Ukraine. Ridiculously, it is demanding Beijing to do this job at the cost of damaging China-Russia relations. This is unreasonable and insidious.”

Russia has committed only a fraction of its military capacity to Ukraine. Other than replacing ordnance, it’s not clear what military aid Russia would need from China.

Substitute War and Economic Catastrophe

The U.S. already has sanctions on China, as it had earlier on Russia. However, if the United States is seriously planning similar types of sanctions on Beijing that it has leveled on Moscow — against its major banks, against the central bank, removing it from SWIFT and cutting off key exports — the impact on the world economy — including on Europe and the United States — could be catastrophic.

The U.S. national security strategy for several years has been aimed at both Russia and China. Knowing it must avoid a direct military confrontation against either, given the potential consequences, the U.S. is turning to economic warfare to ultimately attempt to bring down both governments through popular uprisings. Washington wants to replace them with Western-friendly leaders who would open up their economies to Western exploitation — just like Boris Yeltsin did in the 1990s.

The United States is acting as though the whole world is the West and that this is the China of 30 years ago. In its bull-headed effort to impose its unilateral rule on the world, while its domestic social problems mount, the U.S. has not only driven Russia and China closer together than ever, but it has now brought in India, much of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, (all of whom have refused to sanction Russia and continues to trade with it), into a new bloc with economic power that exceeds the West.

The U.S. has turned the majority of the world’s population against it. And it is now threatening to blow up the world economy. Cutting off trade and finance to Russia has already boomeranged on Western countries, driving up prices, especially at the pump. Instead of prompting a popular uprising in Russia as a result of its sanctions, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity has actually risen since the invasion.

Adding China as a target of its economic war could drive the populations of the U.S. and Europe against their own governments instead.

consortiumnews.com

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”.

Higher fuel and food prices are a sacrifice I’m prepared to make in exchange for a greatly increased likelihood of nuclear armageddon.

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Let’s be clear: you’re not paying more for necessities to punish Putin and save Ukraine, you’re paying more for necessities to fund an economic war of unprecedented scale geared toward collapsing Russia to help secure US unipolar domination of this planet.

It’s not “Putin’s price hike”. This was all orchestrated by the empire, from root to flower. The goal is to use economic warfare and a costly counterinsurgency against western-backed Ukrainians to either collapse and balkanize the Russian Federation or foment enough discontent to secure regime change in Moscow. This is because Putin refuses to kiss the imperial ring.

The western empire could not possibly care less about Ukrainians beyond the extent to which they can be used to roll out this agenda. There hasn’t been nearly enough public rage about the fact that the US government knew this war was coming, knew exactly how to prevent it with very low-cost concessions to Moscow, and chose not to. They made that choice in order to advance this agenda.

That’s what you’re paying for as your cost of living skyrockets. Not freedom and democracy. Not saving Ukrainian lives. Just the very mundane and unsexy unipolarist objectives of a few sociopathic empire managers. Empire managers who, of course, will have no trouble paying for things like fuel and groceries while ordinary people struggle.

And if you think these cold war escalations against Russia are hurting your bank account, wait til the imperial crosshairs move to China.

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One under-appreciated aspect of online censorship is how the fear of losing a valuable platform understandably causes people to self-censor, thereby widening the radius of the censorship campaign’s effectiveness a lot further than the actual censorship:

Never thought I’d be so worried about being censored all the time. Very carefully and cautiously watching what I say and how I say it, deciding I shouldn’t even say it at all. Some democracy we have here on the internet. Very healthy.

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) March 12, 2022

It’s exactly the same as the “cooling effect” that the persecution of whistleblowers and journalists has on leaks and investigative journalism. People shying away from speech they could be punished for does a lot more to restrict speech than the punishments themselves.

If for example a chemical attack occurs in Ukraine and is blamed on Russia, there will be great fear of questioning the official narrative about it on YouTube for fear of losing one’s platform because YouTube has banned skepticism of official stories about violence in that nation. People will self-censor to avoid being punished for their speech.

This is the exact same principle as a king having an artist who spoke ill of him tortured in the public square in order to deter future acts of dissent. Just re-packaged to be more palatable for the modern world.

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When someone brings up bad things the US does in response to outrage over bad things Russia does, it’s not to defend Russia. It’s to get the US to stop doing bad things.

Bleating “whataboutism” at sincere attempts to get the US empire to stop doing evil things is just defending those evil things. You’re basically just saying “Shut up! Now’s not the time to talk about the bad things the US power alliance does, we’re on something else right now!” Okay, so when? Never? Nothing has ever been done about the crimes of the empire. No meaningful changes whatsoever were made after Iraq.

Russia invading Ukraine doesn’t magically erase the fact that the western empire has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in wars of aggression and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it. Putin would have to work very, very hard to catch up to those numbers. That still needs to be talked about, and it still needs to end.

EXCLUSIVE: Twenty years after 9/11, compelling statistical data suggests that the true death toll of the ‘War on Terror’ is a staggering *6 million people*: which is likely a conservative estimate. I breakdown the data for @BylineTimes https://t.co/YTV6IoZ3ic

— Dr Nafeez Ahmed FRSA (@NafeezAhmed) September 15, 2021

People talk about this like it’s something in the past, something the US and its allies did back in history but now it’s Russia doing it. No, this is happening currently in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela etc, and will continue to happen unless drastic changes are made.

The murderousness, tyranny and omnicidal recklessness of the US-centralized empire is a problem of unequalled urgency regardless of what Russia happens to be doing. You can’t just bleat “whataboutism” and make that go away. It’s a problem that urgently needs to be dealt with.

It’s an objectively good thing if more attention is brought to that urgent problem by someone saying “Oh you’re upset about this war? Wait til you hear about what your own government has been doing.” Any attempt to interfere in their pointing this out is facilitating mass murder. Either help draw attention to this problem or stop interrupting people who are drawing attention to it with power-serving gibberish about “whataboutism”.

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Western leaders appear to have gone to the NYPD Academy of De-Escalation.

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During the Cuban Missile Crisis everyone had a healthy fear of nuclear annihilation, and people wanted de-escalation above all else. Today hardly anyone even cares about the insane nuclear brinkmanship games being played, and all mainstream factions are calling only for escalation.

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Schrödinger’s Putin: Simultaneously a crazy deranged lunatic and also much too level-headed and rational to respond to western escalations with nuclear weapons.

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Love how shitlibs finally decide to become “anti-war” the second their “anti-war” activism has a chance to help manufacture consent for World War 3.

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Four years of demented propaganda about an imaginary Trump-Russia conspiracy, Kremlin Facebook memes and GRU bounties in Afghanistan turned liberals into a bunch of gnashing, frothing zombies starved for Russian flesh. Ukraine just gave them something to sink their teeth into.

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Always wondered how long it would take for DuckDuckGo to get absorbed into the imperial narrative management campaign. https://t.co/yRHoUQHxe3

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 10, 2022

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I don’t understand the common sentiment on the left that we need to spend a lot of energy criticizing Putin for this war in the same way we criticize our own rulers for their warmongering. Like even forgetting about all the things western powers did to give rise to the war in Ukraine, what specifically is the argument here? That the English-speaking world doesn’t have enough criticism of the Russian invasion, and has too much criticism of NATO aggression? That if more antiwar lefties scream about Putin he’ll go “Ah shit I pissed off a few fringe westerners, let’s cancel the war you guys”? It just doesn’t seem like those who make such claims have thought very hard about the position they’re trying to advance.

Our voices can do far more good criticizing the actions of our own governments, which receive barely any criticism, than those of someone else’s government which gets tons. It also can’t be denied that there’s a major propaganda push to manufacture consent for dangerous agendas which pre-date the invasion by many years. Is my voice better used opposing those dangerous agendas, or in helping to facilitate them by saying the same things everyone else is already saying?

Putin is bad! Putin is bad and his war is very bad!

There. I did the thing. Can anyone tell me what I just accomplished, apart from greasing the wheels for new cold war escalations? Did I plow any new ground? Expand awareness in any new direction? What specific good did I do?

None that I can see.

The fact that the Russian people are doing a better job of holding their government to account with massive antiwar protests than people in western nations have says terrible things about us and our obsequiousness to our warmongering masters. If you can’t criticize your government, you are more obedient than Russians living under Putin.

Criticizing Putin is the easiest thing in the world for a westerner to do right now. Low cost, maximum clicks, but has zero impact on the conflict and will save zero people. Criticizing the west for its role is hard; it gets you outrage mobbed, deplatformed and shunned. But it could work.

None of these outrage merchants would ever dream of going against their own government, because if they tried they would find themselves smashed against the invisible walls of our inverted totalitarian cage. On some level they know this. That’s why they project.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

(Click on the image to enlarge)