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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52012.htm

Brazil’s Massive Crime Against Humanity

The corrupt Brazilian government installed by Washington has decided to destroy the Amazon Rain Forest. This will adversely affect the Earth’s climate by eliminating a massive carbon sink.

The beneficiaries of the destruction of the rain forest are the timber loggers who are buddies with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, environmental minister Ricardo Salles, and farming lobbyist Tereza Cristina Dias.

One might have thought that the build-up of CO2 and the impact of carbon emissions in raising the temperature of Earth would result in more careful and responsible policies than one that destroys a unique ecological habitat that stabilizes the Earth’s climate. For no other reason than to maximize profits for timber loggers, the Amazon Rain Forest is to be destroyed. This is unregulated international gangster capitalism at work. Destroy the planet for everyone else so that a handful of gangsters can acquire fortunes.

We cannot expect any intelligence in a government where Dias dismisses global warming as “an international Marxist plot.” Dias sounds like a parrot for the anti-global warming think tanks sponsored by the carbon energy lobby. Anything that would constrain short-run profits regardless of their long-run costs is dismissed as a hoax or a communist plot.

President Lula de Silva and his successor Dilma Rousseff attempted to run Brazil in the interests of a broader segment of the population than the robber-baron capitalists. In its unbridled form, capitalism is an exploitative mechanism that permits a few people to grab large profits in the near term by imposing massive external costs on the broader society and the environment. The more responsible policies of Lula and Rousseff enraged the Brazilian robber barons and their backers in Washington. Using the capitalist controlled press, Brazil’s gangster capitalists demonized Lula and Rousseff. They were accused of money laundering and “passive corruption.” The most corrupt elements on the political scene framed them up on false charges. Lula was imprisoned and Rousseff was impeached and removed from office, thus turning the country back over to Washington and the corrupt Brazilian capitalists. The idiot Brazilian population accepted this. The fools believed their enemies.

Currently, the rain forest is being destroyed at the rate of 3 football fields per minute. The rain forest has already lost 17 percent of its tree cover. Scientists report that when deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent the rain forest converts to savanna and loses its ability to absorb carbon. But the concerns expressed at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research are not as important to Bolsonaro and his cronies as the profits temporarily gained by destroying the rain forest along with the many species dependant on the habitat of the rain forest.

The policies for which a small handful of Brazilian capitalist gangsters, backed by Washington, are responsible will have massive effects and impose massive costs on the rest of mankind. More melting of ice and release of methane, rising and more acidic oceans, drought, water stress, more intense storms all of which affect food production. The extinction rates of species increase. The external costs are many and massive. The profits of the capitalists from plundering the Amazon rain forest will be exceeded a billion times over by the external costs imposed on the rest of the world by a handful of Brazilian political gangsters.

What is happening right now in Brazil is a massive crime against humanity. It is such a massive crime that the countries on Earth should unite and give the corrupt gangster Brazilian government an ultimatum: Stop the deforestation of the Amazon Rain Forest or be invaded and put on trial for crimes against humanity. There is no greater crime than to make the Earth uninhabitable. There is no better case for war than to protect the global climate and life on earth.

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https://acting-man.com/?p=54571

Realizing the Full Implications of the Forthcoming Catastrophe

Delivering Tomorrow’s Curses

Roman poet Virgil penned these words in his epic, The Aeneid, roughly a generation before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. They can be loosely translated to, “the descent to hell is easy.” Those who’ve traversed this passage can attest to the veracity of this axiom.

Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia and Livia. Contrary to what one might think at first blush, Octavia didn’t fall asleep because she was bored by it – rather, when Virgil recited Book Six, she fainted (the veracity of this account is not undisputed, but it’s a good story anyway). A little side note: Virgil caught a fever while returning from to Rome from Greece and died in Brundisium in 19 BC. It was Virgil’s wish that the poem be burned, but Augustus ordered his literary executors to preserve it and publish it with as few editorial changes as possible. Thus Augustus rescued the Aeneid for posterity. [PT]

Though not apparent in the milieu of Virgil’s poem, for our purposes today, we will extend its application to the insidious progression of currency debasement. What short utterance more aptly characterizes the steady degradation, as currently practiced by today’s church of state?

On Thursday, for example, the House acted with untroubled ease to further America’s descent to hell. With little resistance, federal spending was increased and the debt ceiling was suspended for two years. Having delivered tomorrow’s curses, the nation’s Representatives can skip town without missing a moment of summer recess.

As you can see, the allure of getting something for nothing is far too enticing for even the most honest politician to pass up. And with an endless supply of fake money behind you, why stick your neck out and get clobbered? The public debt encumbered is already well beyond honest repayment. But that’s a problem for tomorrow; not today.

Total US credit market debt (~USD 73 trillion), total federal debt (~USD 22 trillion) and GDP (~USD 19 trillion). The growing mismatch between economic output and debt is an unsustainable trend, which is to say, one day it will stop. What happens then is anyone’s guess – the precise shape of the eventual denouement will largely depend on the response by assorted central economic planning agencies, above all on the measures of the central bank. [PT]

Representative government in America, circa now, has nothing to do with upholding individual freedoms and liberties. Nor is it about making tough decisions in the interest of the long-term health of the nation. It’s about doing the expedient – and suspending the debt ceiling so the descent to hell can be made as comfortable as possible.

Wreckage from the Past

Rarely are people capable of understanding the full implications of a forthcoming catastrophe of their making. Perhaps, it’s not because they are truly incapable of it. More likely, it’s because they’d rather ignore it.

Facing up to the facts of an unpleasant reality can be painful. It also implies a recognition that what one has been doing isn’t working. And that the arduous task of righting one’s wrongs must be initiated forthright.

Pursuing delusion, of course, is abundantly easier – for a time. However, as the wreckage piles up from the past to the present, the day of reckoning becomes much more ominous. There really is no escaping it.

Certainly, Congress is far from this recognition. Otherwise, they would get serious about the nation’s fiscal doom, tighten their belts, reverse course, and suffer the immediate consequences. But that is not what is happening at all.

Instead, Congress is doubling down on their wreckage from the past. They are blowing the debt out like there’s no tomorrow. The insanity of it, even for a casual observer, is near impossible to ignore.

The federal debtberg – if it were a stock, people would admire its strong momentum. With the “debt ceiling” problem removed, another jump is already baked in the cake. [PT]

For example, at the turn of the new millennium, the national debt was $5.7 trillion. By 2010 it had more than doubled to $13.5 trillion. By 2020, it will be over $24 trillion.

Hence, over the last 20 years the national debt has increased 320 percent. But over this same period, nominal gross domestic product (GDP) has only increased 100 percent. What’s more, this divergence stands to get much more extreme…

Realizing the Full Implications of the Forthcoming Catastrophe

When the next recession arrives, and Washington pulls out all the stops to counteract it with massive new applications of debt based stimulus, the debt will go vertical while GDP flat lines or contracts. These different trajectories will be reconciled by default or price inflation. Washington, no doubt, prefers price inflation.

The popular delusion of the 21st century is to assume the highest virtues of democracy. This faulty assumption propagates a dangerous archetype: the tyranny of the masses and its twin consequences, deficits and inflation.

What the heck, let’s raise the ceiling just one more time… no-one is likely to notice or care. [PT]

Voters want a free lunch. They want their neighbors to pay for it. They elect stooges to office who promise massive social welfare, public works, and defense spending programs. Then, the hack economists advance an absurd theory – like Modern Monetary Theory – to deliver something for nothing.

The deficits mount up year after year, the currency’s debased year after year, until something gives. In short order, confidence evaporates and price inflation explodes. The country succumbs to political, economic, and cultural destruction.

Indeed, the descent to hell is easy. But Virgil also adds a lesser known corollary, “Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est,” which can generally mean, “But to retrace the way and return to the upper airs; this is the task, and where the mighty labor lies.”

A 3rd century mosaic showing Vergilius seated between Clio and Melpomene. It is widely held that the Aeneid ends with Book 12, in which Aeneas defeats Turnus and spurns his pleas for mercy. The lamenting soul of Turnus then enters the Hades to dwell in the Stygian swamps. What is not so well known is that Virgil actually wrote a 13th book; the mosaic depicts him reciting the most famous verse from it to his enraptured audience: “…and now it has come to pass, that we are totally screwed. Stick a fork in it.” (it sounds better in dactylic hexameter). [PT]

Congress may still ignore it. The Treasury Secretary may still ignore it. The President too. But for more and more Americans the full implications of the forthcoming catastrophe are becoming painfully clear. That is, the realization that we are absolutely and utterly screwed.

Woohoo!

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/things-to-come/

Things to Come

“American exceptionalism has led to a country that is exceptionally un-self-aware.” — Peter Thiel

The economic contraction ahead will put this borderline psychotic country through some interesting ch-ch-ch-changes. Mr. Trump now fully owns the Potemkin status quo of record stock markets poised against a withering rot of human capital at the core of an industrial society in sunset mode. Leadership at every corner of American life — politics, business, media — expects an ever-higher tech magical updraft of fortune from an increasingly holographic economy of mere fugitive appearances in which everybody can get more of something for nothing. The disappointment over how all this works out will be epic.

Globalism is wobbling badly. It was never what it was cracked up to be: a permanent new plateau of exquisitely-tuned international economic cooperation engineered to perfection. It was just a set of provisional relations based on transient advantage. As it turned out, every move that advantaged US-based corporations blew back ferociously on the American public and the long-term integrity of the social order. Sinister as it seems, the process was simply emergent: a self-organizing evolution of forces previously set in motion. And, like a lot of things in history, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Off-shoring” US industry jacked up corporate profits while it decimated working class livelihoods. In return, that large demographic got “bargain shopping” at Walmart, a life of ever-upward revolving debt, and dead downtowns. The country got gigantic trade deficits and government debt loads. In effect, globalism compelled America to borrow as much as possible from the future to keep running things the way they were set up to run. Now, there is just suspicion that we’ve reached the limits of borrowing. Soon it will be a fact and that fact will upend everything we’ve been doing.

You can see how this is playing out in politics, especially the proposed government-enforced redistribution of whatever wealth is supposed to be left. Of course, much of that wealth is a figment, represented in abstract financial instruments pegged to “money” that may have a lot less value than presumed. The Democratic Party detects opportunity in the gross imbalances of this notional capital and so they are promising every conceivable form of grift to voters from a guaranteed basic income and free medical care and college education to reparations for the descendants of slaves.

They certainly might win the 2020 election on the basis of that proffer, but good luck scaring up the actual financial mojo to make it happen without destroying whatever value remains in the US dollar. The predicament may be aggravated by foreign capital seeking refuge in US financial markets as the banking systems in China and Euroland unwind, giving politicians the false impression that other people’s money belongs to Americans. And anyway, what will these foreigners actually be investing in here? Collateralized loan obligations based on seven-year used-car payment schemes?

The American Left just can’t grok the fact that we missed the window of opportunity for setting up a national health system. That was a mid-twentieth century thang: cheap oil and industrial growth. Please note: it was the Democratic Party under Mr. Obama that turned the college loan industry (and Higher Ed with it) into the appalling racket it’s become, because it fit the template of a society pretending to prosper by racking up debt. That demographic of debtors will be seeking magical debt relief. If they get it, it will be at the expense of the government that took on the guaranteed backing of all that debt, now well over a trillion dollars.

Industrial growth is over, and with it the expectation that all the old debts can be paid back. A few economic commentators are predicting “stag-flation.” We’d be lucky if that’s all it turned out to be. But we’re unlikely to get a re-play of the 1970s. That was an era of geo-financial disturbance that resolved for a while with new oil from Alaska and the North Sea. That’s not going to happen again this time. Stag-flation was just a matter of going nowhere for a decade. The contraction ahead will be brutal, not going nowhere but rather going down hard to a lower and harsher standard of living.

It’s also hard to calculate how disturbing and disruptive the prosecution of the RussiaGate perps will be. If the Democratic Party is acting batshit crazy about it now after the Mueller testimony fiasco, how will they react when dozens of their partisans are marched into court to face charges of sedition. That ugly business looks on-track to collide with the coming financial distress. The result will be much more severe political turbulence than the thinking class expects. It’s easy to imagine circumstances in which normal institutions get suspended and the old major parties are superseded by “emergency” seizures of power by other parties as yet unknown.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51992.htm

The United States Has Passed a Point of no Return

The Great Reckoning

From our present vantage point, it seems clear that, by 2019, the United States had passed a point of no return. In retrospect, this was the moment when indications of things gone fundamentally awry should have become unmistakable. Although at the time much remained hidden in shadows, the historic pivot now commonly referred to as the Great Reckoning had commenced.

Even today, it remains difficult to understand why, given mounting evidence of a grave crisis, passivity persisted for so long across most sectors of society. An epidemic of anomie affected a large swath of the population. Faced with a blizzard of troubling developments, large and small, Americans found it difficult to put things into anything approximating useful perspective. Few even bothered to try. Fewer succeeded. As with predictions of cataclysmic earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, a not-in-my-lifetime mood generally prevailed.

During what was then misleadingly known as the Age of Trump, the political classes dithered. While the antics of President Donald Trump provoked intense interest — the word “intense” hardly covers the attention paid to him — they also provided a convenient excuse for letting partisan bickering take precedence over actual governance or problem solving of any sort. Meanwhile, “thought leaders” (a term then commonly used to describe pontificating windbags) indulged themselves with various pet projects.

In the midst of what commentators were pleased to call the Information Age, most ordinary Americans showed a pronounced affinity for trivia over matters of substance. A staggering number of citizens willingly traded freedom and privacy for convenience, bowing to the dictates of an ever-expanding array of personalized gadgetry. What was then called a “smartphone” functioned as a talisman of sorts, the electronic equivalent of a rosary or prayer beads. Especially among the young, separation from one’s “phone” for more than a few minutes could cause acute anxiety and distress. The novelty of “social media” had not yet worn off, with its most insidious implications just being discovered.

Divided, distracted, and desperately trying to keep up: these emerged then as the abiding traits of life in contemporary America. Craft beer, small-batch bourbon, and dining at the latest farm-to-table restaurant often seemed to matter more than the fate of the nation or, for that matter, the planet as a whole. But all that was about to change.

Scholars will undoubtedly locate the origins of the Great Reckoning well before 2019. Perhaps they will trace its source to the aftermath of the Cold War when American elites succumbed to a remarkable bout of imperial hubris, while ignoring (thanks in part to the efforts of Big Energy companies) the already growing body of information on the human-induced alteration of the planet, which came to be called “climate change” or “global warming.” While, generally speaking, the collective story of humankind unfolds along a continuum, by 2019 conditions conducive to disruptive change were forming. History was about to zig sharply off its expected course.

This disruption occurred, of course, within a specific context. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, American society absorbed a series of punishing blows. First came the contested election of 2000, the president of the United States installed in office by a 5-4 vote of a politicized Supreme Court, which thereby effectively usurped the role of the electorate. And that was just for starters. Following in short order came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which the world’s (self-proclaimed) premier intelligence services failed to anticipate and the world’s preeminent military establishment failed to avert.

Less than two years later, the administration of George W. Bush, operating under the delusion that the ongoing war in Afghanistan was essentially won, ordered U.S. forces to invade Iraq, a nation that had played no part in the events of 9/11. The result of this patently illegal war of aggression would not be victory, despite the president’s almost instant “mission accomplished” declaration, but a painful replay of the quagmire that U.S. troops had experienced decades before in Vietnam. Expectations of Iraq’s “liberation” paving the way for a broader Freedom Agenda that would democratize the Islamic world came to naught. The Iraq War and other armed interventions initiated during the first two decades of the century ended up costing trillionsof taxpayer dollars, while sowing the seeds of instability across much of the Greater Middle East and later Africa.

Then, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, killing nearly 2,000 Americans. U.S. government agencies responded with breathtaking ineptitude, a sign of things to come, as nature itself was turning increasingly unruly. Other natural disasters of unnatural magnitude followed. In 2007, to cite but one example, more than 9,000 wildfires in California swept through more than a million acres. Like swarms of locusts, fires now became an annual (and worsening) plague ravaging the Golden State and the rest of the West Coast. If this weren’t enough of a harbinger of approaching environmental catastrophe, the populations of honeybees, vital to American agriculture, began to collapse in these very same years.

Americans were, as it turned out, largely indifferent to the fate of honeybees. They paid far greater attention to the economy, however, which experienced its own form of collapse in 2008. The ensuing Great Recession saw millions thrown out of work and millions more lose their homes as a result of fraudulent mortgage practices. None of the perpetrators were punished. The administration of President Barack Obama chose instead to bail out offending banks and large corporations. Record federal deficits resulted, as the government abandoned once and for all even the pretense of trying to balance the budget. And, of course, the nation’s multiple wars dragged on and on and on.

Through all these trials, the American people more or less persevered. If not altogether stoic, they remained largely compliant. As a result, few members of the nation’s political, economic, intellectual, or cultural elites showed any awareness that something fundamental might be amiss. The two established parties retained their monopoly on national politics. As late as 2016, the status quo appeared firmly intact. Only with that year’s presidential election did large numbers of citizens signal that they had had enough: wearing red MAGA caps rather than wielding pitchforks, they joined Donald Trump’s assault on that elite and, thumbing their noses at Washington, installed a reality TV star in the White House.

To the legions who had found the previous status quo agreeable, Trump’s ascent to the apex of American politics amounted to an unbearable affront. They might tolerate purposeless, endless wars, raise more or less any set of funds for the military that was so unsuccessfully fighting them, and turn a blind eye to economic arrangements that fostered inequality on a staggering scale. They might respond to the accelerating threat posed by climate change with lip service and, at best, quarter-measures. But Donald Trump in the Oval Office? That they could not abide.

As a result, from the moment of his election, Trump dominated the American scene. Yet the outrage that he provoked, day in and day out, had this unfortunate side effect: it obscured developments that would in time prove to be of far more importance than the 45th American president himself. Like the “noise” masking signals that, if detected and correctly interpreted, might have averted Pearl Harbor in December 1941 or, for that matter, 9/11, obsessing about Trump caused observers to regularly overlook or discount matters far transcending in significance the daily ration of presidential shenanigans.

Here, then, is a very partial listing of some of the most important of those signals then readily available to anyone bothering to pay attention. On the eve of the Great Reckoning, however, they were generally treated as mere curiosities or matters of limited urgency — problems to be deferred to a later, more congenial moment.

Item: The reality of climate change was now indisputable. All that remained in question was how rapidly it would occur and the extent (and again rapidity) of the devastation that it would ultimately inflict.

Item: Despite everything that was then known about the dangers of further carbon emissions, the major atmospheric contributor to global warming, they only continued to increase, despite the myriad conferences and agreements intended to curb them. (U.S. carbon emissions, in particular, were still rising then, and global emissions were expected to rise by record or near-record amounts as 2019 began.)

Item: The polar icecap was disappearing, with scientists reporting that it had melted more in just 20 years than in the previous 10,000. This, in turn, meant that sea levels would continue to rise at record rates, posing an increasing threat to coastal cities.

Item: Deforestation and desertification were occurring at an alarming rate.

Item: Approximately eight million metric tons of plastic were seeping into the world’s oceans each year, from the ingestion of which vast numbers of seabirds, fish, and marine mammals were dying annually. Payback would come in the form of microplastics contained in seafood consumed by humans.

Item: With China and other Asian countries increasingly refusing to accept American recyclables, municipalities in the United States found themselves overwhelmed by accumulations of discarded glass, plastic, metal, cardboard, and paper. That year, the complete breakdown of the global recycling system already loomed as a possibility.

Item: Worldwide bird and insect populations were plummeting. In other words, the Sixth Mass Extinction had begun.

All of these fall into the category of what we recognize today as planetary issues of existential importance. But even in 2019 there were other matters of less than planetary significance that ought to have functioned as a wake-up call. Among them were:

Item: With the federal government demonstrably unable to secure U.S. borders, immigration authorities were seizing hundreds of thousands of migrants annually. By 2019, the Trump administration was confining significant numbers of those migrants, including small children, in what were, in effect, concentration camps.

Item: Cyber crime had become a major growth industry, on track to rake in $6 trillion annually by 2021. Hackers were already demonstrating the ability to hold large American cities hostage and the authorities proved incapable of catching up.

Item: With the three richest Americans — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet — controlling more wealth than the bottom 50% of the entire population, the United States had become a full-fledged oligarchy. While politicians occasionally expressed their dismay about this reality, prior to 2019 it was widely tolerated.

Item: As measured by roads, bridges, dams, or public transportation systems, the nation’s infrastructure was strikingly inferior to what it had been a half-century earlier. (By 2019, China, for instance, had built more than 19,000 miles of high-speed rail; the U.S., not one.) Agreement that this was a problem that needed fixing was universal; corrective action (and government financing), however, was not forthcoming.

Item: Military spending in constant dollars exceeded what it had been at the height of the Cold War when the country’s main adversary, the Soviet Union, had a large army with up-to-date equipment and an arsenal of nuclear weapons. In 2019, Iran, the country’s most likely adversary, had a modest army and no nuclear weapons.

Item: Incivility, rudeness, bullying, and general nastiness had become rampant, while the White House, once the site of solemn ceremony, deliberation, and decision, played host to politically divisive shouting matches and verbal brawls.

To say that Americans were oblivious to such matters would be inaccurate. Some were, for instance, considering a ban on plastic straws. Yet taken as a whole, the many indications of systemic and even planetary dysfunction received infinitely less popular attention than the pregnancies of British royals, the antics of the justifiably forgotten Kardashian clan, or fantasy football, a briefly popular early twenty-first century fad.

Of course, decades later, viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the implications of these various trends and data points seem painfully clear: the dominant ideological abstraction of late postmodernity — liberal democratic capitalism — was rapidly failing or had simply become irrelevant to the challenges facing the United States and the human species as a whole. To employ another then-popular phrase, liberal democratic capitalism had become an expression of “fake news,” a scam sold to the many for the benefit of the privileged few.

“Toward the end of an age,” historian John Lukacs (1924-2019) once observed, “more and more people lose faith in their institutions and finally they abandon their belief that these institutions might still be reformed from within.” Lukacs wrote those words in 1970, but they aptly described the situation that had come to exist in that turning-point year of 2019. Basic American institutions no longer commanded popular respect.

In essence, the postmodern age was ending, though few seemed to know it — with elites, in particular, largely oblivious to what was occurring. What would replace postmodernity in a planet heading for ruin remained to be seen.

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https://www.peakprosperity.com/overdosing-on-crazy-pills/

Overdosing On Crazy Pills

If you think everything's OK, you're nuts

Sometimes an otherwise-forgettable movie will be lifted up out of obscurity by the internet and made into a useful meme.

In the movie Zoolander Will Ferrell’s character, ‘Jacobim Mugatu,’ screams the line “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” because it seems nobody else sees what he does.

I have that feeling nearly every day now. And it’s getting more frequent and intense.

To the point where, some days, it feels like I’m in danger of overdosing on crazy pills.

Crazy Pill #1

Financial bubbles happen. History is full of them. It’s just that they’re just not supposed to happen more than once a generation.

How can so many people have completely forgotten the painful lessons of not one, but two, recent bubbles?

The bursting of the DotCom bubble in 2000 was traumatic. “Eyeballs” were favored for a time over “earnings.” But then investors woke up to the fact that all of their rationalizations for the sky-high valuations of profitless companies were actually ridiculous.

Okay, fine. Lesson learned. Earnings are actually important.

But here we go, again, less than 20 years after the DotCom bubble (and only 10 years post-subprime bubble — both far less than a full generation later to allow the keepers of the memories a chance to die off) with exactly the same dynamic at play:

% of IPOS with negative earnings

In the pre-financialization era that ended a few decades ago, a more normal mix would have been roughly 15% of IPOs with negative earnings. Today it’s nearly 80%.

Just as it was in 2000.

By way of example, let’s look at Uber and Lyft. Both companies aren’t just unprofitable, but wildly so. The more these companies make in revenue, the greater the accompanying losses:

Lyft revenue & profit chart

This is the very essence of a broken business model. It’s no different – literally, exactly the same – as a circa-1999 DotCom losing gobs of money on a pie-in-the-sky business scheme that sounded great but didn’t actually work.

No matter to Lyft’s stock price, though, as the market (or ““market”” as I refer to it because it’s so deformed it needs double quote marks to signify that condition) now values this cash-burning furnace at $18.9 billion:

Lyft stock price chart

Lyft’s stock price just keeps going higher, no matter the losses. One can only imagine how much higher it will explode if Lyft manages to somehow turn in slightly-less-than-negative-as-last-time earnings next quarter.

What matters during an asset price bubble is not the rational, but the rationalizations. Uber and Lyft are “transforming transportation” and “reducing urban congestion” even though taxis already existed and there’s zero evidence of the latter.

Wolf Richter said it very well in a recent piece:

Anything goes: story stocks, momentum stocks, hyperventilation stocks, consensual hallucination stocks, and financial engineering stocks that generate mind-boggling share prices that give these companies incomprehensible market capitalizations, and the mere mention of “fundamentals” gets naysayers ridiculed and thrown out.

It’s like the whole market has gone nuts.

The full quote that goes with the meme is “Doesn’t anyone notice this?!? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!!”

How can people not notice what’s going on?

Crazy Pill #2

I keep reading articles where hapless financial journalists try earnestly to make sense of a world that is now senseless.

It must be terribly frustrating to see the impact the central bank bubble is having on distorting the markets, but your editors disallow you to point any of that out to your readers.

A recent WSJ article noted that investors poured money into bond funds at a record pace in the first half of 2019. It then went on to explain this as a sign that investors might be cautious about the economy.

Sure, that’s probably a fair conclusion during normal times. But not when crazy pills are being served buffet-style by the world’s central banks.

Instead, we have to note that the world now has a whopping $13.7 trillion in negative yielding bonds – meaning record high bond prices – and negative earning IPOs both existing simultaneously.

When investors are cautious, they move money out of stocks and into bonds. That’s what the journalist was grasping for, but that’s not what’s happening now. Money is flooding into both stocks and bonds. It’s concurrently a risk-on and a risk-off environment — which means its actually neither.

It’s a bubble.

A magnificently-deformed time of monetary excesses.

We’re currently witnessing a massive blow-off top that will end in something quite akin to the Dark Ages – a time of systemic breakdown when we’ll be lucky to preserve the pinnacles of our current technological achievements. But let’s save that idea for later.

To make the “Bubble!” claim more concrete, let me burrow in a bit. Switzerland’s government bond market will serve nicely as a case in point:

Swiss 50-yr yield falls below 0%, entire Swiss curve now negative

July 25, 2019

(Reuters) – Swiss 50-year borrowing costs fell below 0% on Thursday for first time since August 2016, meaning Switzerland’s entire government bond market now trades with negative yields.

The 50-year yield fell 2.6 basis points to minus 0.014%.

Pick any Swiss bond of any maturity and you’ll have to pay the Swiss government for the luxury of lending it money.

In the case of the 50-year bond, you’d pay $1,000 today for the pleasure of having the Swiss government promise to pay you back $993 in the year 2069.

Heck, even if the bond was paying 0% vs. a negative amount, that would mean that your money has no value. You give an entity your money and they give you back exactly the same amount 50 years later.

But with negative interest rates, you’re getting even less than that back.

I could possibly make sense of that if we knew that the amount of circulating money was going to fall over time, so there were fewer claims against more ‘things’ over time. That is, deflation.

But we’re in the exact opposite world with global central banks easing like mad at the moment and promising even more. Rate cuts. And more QE. And making serious comments about maybe buying equities directly. Or maybe just print up money and distribute it via MMT. The central banks have promised in word and deed that they’ll do whatever it takes!

Against that backdrop, what can we make of the hundreds and thousands of individual “investors” that are actually buying the Swiss 50-year bond at a negative yield of -0.014%?

If they hold that bond to maturity, they’re going to get less money back than they put in AND the purchasing power of that money is going to be seriously diminished. What sane person would make that deal?

Again, doesn’t anybody notice this?

Crazy Pill #3

By far the largest crazy pill I am taking, a horse-sized one that feels larger than my throat, concerns the serious consequences with society’s addiction to perpetual economic growth.

Edward Abbey said it best:

Edward Abbey quote

" Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell "

That’s what we’ve got now.

There’s nothing wrong with growth per se. But if it becomes the mission instead of the strategy, then it’s cancerous and self-destructive.

Virtually nobody in power ever questions the “need” for economic growth. It’s a universally understood imperative, especially among the banking class.

Despite already having supremely frothy stock prices and negative bond yields that require mega-doses of crazy pills to even contemplate, the world’s central banks are desperately scrambling to justify easing more — to drive stock and bond prices to even frothier heights.

And for what exactly? What’s so urgent, right here and now, about getting even more growth?

In nature, seasons come and go. The sun rises and sets. But if it were up to the central banks, the sun would stay perched at its mid-summer noon apex forever. Think of the corn yields!

Maybe we can invent a pill that will banish sleep. Think of the extra productivity of the resulting 80-hour work week!

Meanwhile, casually scanning the headlines we notice multiplying ecological breakdowns like these:

July is on track to become Earth’s hottest month on record, climate scientists say
Phosphate shortage: The dwindling resource required to grow food
Russia alarmed by large fall in bee populations – BBC News
EPA restores broad use of pesticide opposed by beekeepers
‘Precipitous’ fall in Antarctic sea ice since 2014 revealed
We’re not fixing climate change
Wild bee species critical to pollination on the decline
Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’
Chennai, India, Is Running Out of Water. Other Cities Will Be Soon …
Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues …

Individually any one of these might be explained away as a fluke. But collectively? They clearly shout that something is terribly wrong with the natural world resulting from our current monomaniacal pursuit of growth.

The current trajectory of the environmental data is frightening. People either are aware of this, ignorant of it, or in denial about it. Anybody of my age (mid 50’s) who spent time outside as a kid, or has noticed the recent dearth of insects on the screen door on summer nights, can see with their own eyes how the natural world of insects and migratory birds has been collapsing.

Doesn’t anybody else notice this?

To me, it’s just a simple statement of fact to say that the economy is a subset of the natural world. No ecology = no economy. No oysters in the bay means no oyster fishery. No soil means no farming.

But the way things are currently configured, within every political and financial institution, along with their compliant media presstitutes, the one and only goal is more GDP growth.

Which means more throughput of ‘stuff’. Resources + energy = more stuff.

When times get tough and GDP starts looking like it might (gasp!) fall, the State freaks out and floods the world with more money and more credit to cattle-prod the economy back to ‘health’.

The implicit, if not explicit, assumption contained therein is that some sort of salvation, or broad social good, results from perpetual GDP growth.

That was coincidentally true during the 1700’s, 1800’s and most of the 1900’s. But it’s absolutely not true anymore in the 2000’s. The blind pursuit of growth is now diminishing society’s prospects, not enhancing them. But the keepers of power have not managed to adjust to this new reality.

At least not publicly. Though you should see the number of rich people and high-level government institutions that are preparing for massive disruptions by building world-class bug-out shelters and stocking up years of provisions.

You might consider doing the same. Just in case.

I certainly have.
Conclusion

Being at peace with today’s status quo requires taking crazy pills. Lots and lots of them.

Such is the nature of late-stage bubbles.

It’s also the nature of civilizations that have run their narrative past the breaking point. Late-empire Romans needed crazy pills to believe in Emperor Caligula. So did the Aztecs when they embraced Cortez.

Towards the end, the leadership of a dwindling civilization isn’t the cause the decline, but reflective of it. Once the narrative thread no longer makes any sense, having defective leadership is a requirement. It’s something the culture demands in order to keep the perverted status quo going.

This is why I’m strictly apolitical. It matters not to me whether it would have been Trump or Clinton in the White House. Either/both would have been similarly defective leaders. We are badly off the rails at this point, and our political system reflects that.

Similarly, I’m agnostic about who heads the central banks around the world. Draghi was loathsome, but Lagarde won’t be any better. Powell certainly speaks more clearly than Greenspan, but he’s literally no different.

Today we have a small cabal of unelected officials, many without any real-world operating experience (such as starting and managing a productive business) setting the prices of not just money, but of every financial asset. And after they “serve the public” they then rotate into the exact same banks and financial firms that most benefited from their “service.”

How is any of that different from the way the Soviet Union set crop targets and prices? It’s not.

The bottom line is this: Nothing will change until the system breaks.

It’s a 100% guarantee that somewhere between here and 2069 interest rates will be either very far north of -0.014% and/or the Swiss franc (and other fiat currency) has become worthless.

It’s a further guarantee that more cities and, possibly entire countries, will run out of fresh water. Agricultural soils will become vastly less productive. And the world will be well past peak oil....

....It’s entirely possible that ecosystem collapse will render whole new swaths of the globe uninhabitable to humans.

But, by all means, buy as much Uber and Lyft stock as you want.

But if you do, be sure to chug down a handful of crazy pills first.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/sergey-lavrov-perilous-world-conditions/5684408

The Most Perilous Time in World History. Tense US-Russia Relations

Sergey Lavrov on Perilous World Conditions

I’ve stressed time and again that today is the most perilous time in world history.

It’s because of US rage to control planet earth, its resources, and populations by whatever it takes to achieve its objectives — preemptive wars against nonbelligerent states its favored strategy.

Bipartisan US neocons risk the unthinkable – possible nuclear war against key adversaries, the threat hanging like a sword of Damocles over humanity.

Jack Kennedy transformed himself from a warrior to peacemaker in office — why dark forces in Washington eliminated him.

He once slammed extremists during his tenure who wanted to nuke Soviet Russia while the US had a big advantage, saying: “And we call ourselves the human race.”

Since his time in office, none like him have held high-level executive or congressional positions in Washington.

Following his state-sponsored assassination to the present day, the US has been perpetually at war against invented enemies. No real ones existed since Japan’s September 1945 surrender.

Yet countless trillions of dollars have been and continue to be poured down a black hole of waste, fraud and abuse to enrich Wall Street; the military, industrial, security, media complex; and other corporate predators — profiteering at the public trough at the expense of vital homeland needs and social justice.

Sino/Russian unity is a vital anti-imperial counterforce against Washington’s threat to world peace, stability and security.

On Tuesday, Sergey Lavrov discussed major world issues in an interview with a Moscow broadsheet, published in English by Russia’s Foreign Ministry.

Asked if improved relations with the US is possible ahead, he said it won’t “materialize any time soon since it is anything but easy to sort out the mess that our relations are in, which is not our fault,” adding:

“After all, bilateral relations require reciprocal efforts. We have to meet each other half way.”

Russia seeks world peace and cooperative relations with other countries. The US wages endless preemptive wars and other hostile actions against nonbelligerent nations to dominate them — breaching international and constitutional law, operating exclusively by its own rules.

Russia and the US are the world’s leading nuclear powers, Lavrov stressed. They’re founding UN member states and permanent Security Council members, giving them veto power over its actions — for good or ill.

“…Trump talks about seeking to be on good terms with Russia,” said Lavrov — while hardliners in his regime and Congress are overwhelmingly hostile toward the country despite no threat posed by its ruling authorities.

Count the ways. Hostile US actions against Moscow include “financial and economic sanctions, seizing diplomatic property, kidnapping Russian nationals in third countries, opposing Russia’s foreign policy interests, as well as attempts to meddle in our domestic affairs,” Lavrov explained, adding:

“We are seeing system-wide efforts to reach out to almost all countries around the world and persuade them to scale back their relations with Russia.”

“Many US politicians are trying to outshine each other in ramping up anti-Russia phobias, and they are using this factor in their domestic political struggles. We understand that (this) will only escalate in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.”

The Kremlin is falsely accused of all sorts of things it had nothing to do with — from “aggression” in Ukraine, to the Skripal incident, to the downing of MH17, to Crimea joining Russia, to its involvement in Syria, to US election meddling, and much more — all of it Big Lies, assuring hostile, not friendly, relations.

“…Washington has been inconsistent and quite often unpredictable in its actions. For this reason, trying to predict anything in our relations with the US is a fruitless task,” said Lavrov, adding:

“(A)s Russia is concerned, we are ready to patiently work on improving our relations. Of course, this will be possible only if Russia’s interests are respected, and based on equality and mutual respect.”

The US has been hostile toward Russia since its 1917 revolution — except during WW II to defeat the scourge of Nazism and other brief interregnum periods, notably in the late 1980s ahead of Soviet Russia’s December 1991 dissolution.

Bilateral relations today are more dismal than during the height of the Cold War. Nothing in prospect suggests improvement.

It’s highly unlikely as long as US policy prioritizes control of the country and all others. Its aggressive agenda represents an unparalleled threat to planet earth and all its life forms.

In relations with other nations, Russia observes international laws and related obligations — polar opposite how the US and its imperial partners operate, making normalized bilateral relations unattainable.

Lavrov slammed “aggressive (US) methods…using illegal methods” in dealings with Russia and other nations it considers adversaries.

“(T)he Donbass remains extremely disturbing,” he said, US-supported Kiev war on its people in its sixth year, no signs of ending it under new President Vladimir Zelensky — serving US interests and dark forces in his country like his predecessor Poroshenko.

A new era under his leadership didn’t materialize. He broke his inaugural address promise, saying the following:

“(O)ur first task is ceasefire in the Donbass…I’m ready to pay any price to stop the deaths…(W)e are ready for dialogue…”

At the same time, he falsely accused Russia of starting (US orchestrated) war launched by his predecessor, shamefully calling Russia an “aggressor state” — while referring to Donbass and Crimea as “our Ukrainian land.”

Lavrov slammed what he called continuation of “the disastrous course” begun in spring 2014 — following the Obama regime’s coup, replacing Ukraine’s democratically elected government with Nazi-infested putschists.

Lavrov also stressed Russia’s strategic relations with Iran, sharply criticizing US policies toward the country, its leadership and people, saying:

“The escalating tension in the region we are witnessing today is the direct result of Washington and some of its allies raising the stakes in their anti-Iranian policy.”

“The US is flexing its muscles by seeking to discredit Tehran and blame all the sins on the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

“This creates a dangerous situation: a single match can start a fire. The responsibility for the possible catastrophic consequences will rest with the United States.”

Iran has no aggressive regional aims, Lavrov stressed. It seeks peace and cooperative relations with other states.

Russia is acting “proactive(ly) to deescalate tensions…” The Kremlin wants the JCPOA nuclear deal preserved.

US and European actions may doom it. As long as Britain, France, Germany, and the EU remain in breach of their obligations, Tehran will continue moving toward fully resuming its legitimate pre-agreement nuclear activities — its legal right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and JCPOA Articles 26 and 36.

Lavrov stressed that the Kremlin is “working with (other JCPOA signatories) to preserve (the deal) to promote a settlement on the Iranian nuclear program.”

Achieving this objective depends on European actions ahead. Based on what’s happened so far, prospects are dim.

As for Russia/US relations now and ahead, Lavrov explained that “after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the West came to believe that it was the end of history and the West can now blatantly interfere (in) the affairs of any country and presumptuously call the shots in its domestic politics.”

This reality reflects the dismal state of world conditions, notably endless US wars of aggression to transform sovereign independent nations into vassal states.

That’s what the scourge of imperialism is all about.

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https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/07/23/the-jeffrey-epstein-case-offers-a-rare-opportunity-to-focus/#more-58432

The Jeffrey Epstein Case Offers a Rare Opportunity to Focus

Perhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice, more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won’t change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity. For decades, important, influential, “serious” people attended Epstein’s dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: They got something in exchange from him, whether it was a free ride on that airborne “Lolita Express,” some other form of monetary largesse, entrée into the extravagant celebrity soirées he hosted at his townhouse, or, possibly and harrowingly, a pound or two of female flesh.

– From the New York Magazine article: Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling?

An honest assessment of the current state of American politics and society in general leaves little room for optimism regarding the public’s ability to accurately diagnose, much less tackle, our fundamental issues at a root level. A primary reason for this state of affairs boils down to the ease with which the American public is divided against itself and conquered.

Though there are certain issues pretty much everyone can agree on, we simply aren’t focusing our collective energy on them or creating the mass movements necessary to address them. Things such as systemic bipartisan corruption, the institutionalization of a two-tier justice system in which the wealthy and powerful are above the law, a broken economy that requires both parents to work and still barely make ends meet, and a military-industrial complex consumed with profits and imperial aggression not national defense. These are just a few of the many issues that should easily unite us against an entrenched power structure, but it is not happening. At least not yet.

We currently find ourselves at a unique inflection point in American history. Though I agree with Charles Hugh Smith’s assessment that “Our Ruling Elites Have No Idea How Much We Want to See Them All in Prison Jumpsuits,” we have yet to reach the point where the general public is prepared to do something about it. I think there are several reasons for this, but the primary obstacle relates to how easily the citizenry is divided and conquered. The mass media, largely owned and controlled by billionaires and their corporations, is highly incentivized to keep the public divided against itself on trivial issues, or at best, on real problems that are merely symptoms of bipartisan elitist plunder.

The key thing, from a plutocrat’s point of view, is to make sure the public never takes a step back and sees the root of society’s problems. It isn’t Trump or Obama, and it isn’t the Republican or Democratic parties either. These individuals and political gangs are just useful vehicles for elitist plunder. They help herd the rabble into comfortable little tribal boxes that results in made for tv squabbling, while the true forces of power carry on with the business of societal pillaging behind the scenes.

You’re encouraged to attach your identity to team Republican or team Democrat, but never unite as one voice against a bipartisan crew of depraved, corrupt and unaccountable power players molding society from the top. While the average person living paycheck to paycheck fashions themselves part of some biblical fight of good vs. evil by supporting team red or blue, the manipulative and powerful at the top remain beyond such plebeian theater (though they certainly encourage it). These folks know only one team — team green. And their team keeps winning, by the way.

When scanning the news most days, I see a constant amplification of wedge issues by mass media, blue-check pundits and even many in the so-called alternative media. I see people increasingly being encouraged to demonize and dehumanize their fellow citizens. Anyone who voted for Trump is automatically a Nazi, likewise, anyone who supports Sanders is an anti-American communist. The reality is neither of these things is even remotely true, so why are people so quick to say them?

Why is most of the anger in this country being directed at fellow powerless Americans versus upward at the power structure which nurtured and continues to defend the current depraved status quo? I don’t see any upside to actively encouraging one side of the political discussion to dehumanize the other side, and I suggest we consciously cease engaging in such behavior. Absolutely nothing good can come from it.

Which is partly why I’ve been so consumed by the Jeffrey Epstein case. For once, it allows us to focus our energy on the depraved nature of the so-called American “elite,” rather than pick fights with each other. How many random Trump or Sanders supporters do you know who systematically molest children and then pass them off to their wealthy and powerful friends for purposes of blackmail?

The Epstein case shines a gigantic spotlight on just how twisted and sociopathic the highest echelons of U.S. society have become. This is exactly what happens when you fail to put wealthy and powerful super predators behind bars. They get more brazen, they get more demented and, ultimately, they destroy the very fabric that holds society together. We are in fact ruled by monsters.

Unfortunately, by being short-sighted, by fighting amongst ourselves, and by taking the easy route of punching down versus punching up, we allow such cretins to continue to rape and pillage what remains of our civilization.

If we can truly get to the bottom of exactly what Epstein was up to, I suspect it has the potential to focus the general public (beyond a few seconds) on the true nature of what’s really going on and what makes the world tick. Revelations of such a nature could provide the proverbial tipping point that’s so desperately needed, but this is also why the odds of us actually getting the whole story is quite low. There’s simply too much at stake for those calling the shots.

....

A comment to the article,

“There’s simply too much at stake for those calling the shots.” — MK

This, in a nutshell, is why I don’t expect any elite “purge” because of the Epstein story.

Please remember that there were zero (0, zip, nada) prosecutions following the financial crisis with its subsequent bank bailouts and bonuses, despite obvious fraud on a massive scale. It was the largest heist in history. Even Bernie Madoff looked like a common pick-pocket in comparison.

Russiagate is going on three years now, while most of the establishment and media know that it’s a farce, yet they all play along because the truth is too radioactive for the general public.

Note also, that every time markets start to weaken, Central Banks immediately jump in to reverse the trend with massive liquidity infusions that add to their balance sheets. Business cycles and recessions are now outlawed.

And look what they are doing to the Yellow Vests, to Greece, to Brexit, to Assange, to Chelsea Manning, to non-approved alt-media. They are not budging an inch, but doubling down. Why? Because they know that the natives are restless, revolution is in the wind, and any event that pushes the public over their pain threshold could find the elite waiting their turn at the guillotine.

In the meantime, everything is being held together with duct tape and baling wire, until even that gives out and it all finally comes crashing down.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51955.htm

War Profiteers and the Demise of the US Military-Industrial Complex

Within the vast bureaucratic sprawl of the Pentagon there is a group in charge of monitoring the general state of the military-industrial complex and its continued ability to fulfill the requirements of the national defense strategy. Office for acquisition and sustainment and office for industrial policy spends some $100,000 a year producing an Annual Report to Congress. It is available to the general public. It is even available to the general public in Russia, and Russian experts had a really good time poring over it.

In fact, it filled them with optimism. You see, Russia wants peace but the US seems to want war and keeps making threatening gestures against a longish list of countries that refuse to do its bidding or simply don’t share its “universal values.” But now it turns out that threats (and the increasingly toothless economic sanctions) are pretty much all that the US is still capable of dishing out—this in spite of absolutely astronomical levels of defense spending. Let’s see what the US military-industrial complex looks like through a Russian lens.

It is important to note that the report’s authors were not aiming to force legislators to finance some specific project. This makes it more valuable than numerous other sources, whose authors’ main objective was to belly up to the federal feeding trough, and which therefore tend to be light on facts and heavy on hype. No doubt, politics still played a part in how various details are portrayed, but there seems to be a limit to the number of problems its authors can airbrush out of the picture and still do a reasonable job in analyzing the situation and in formulating their recommendations.

What knocked Russian analysis over with a feather is the fact that these INDPOL experts (who, like the rest of the US DOD, love acronyms) evaluate the US military-industrial complex from a… market-based perspective! You see, the Russian military-industrial complex is fully owned by the Russian government and works exclusively in its interests; anything else would be considered treason. But the US military-industrial complex is evaluated based on its… profitability! According to INDPOL, it must not only produce products for the military but also acquire market share in the global weapons trade and, perhaps most importantly, maximize profitability for private investors. By this standard, it is doing well: for 2017 the gross margin (EBITDA) for US defense contractors ranged from 15 to 17%, and some subcontractors—Transdigm, for example—managed to deliver no less than 42-45%. “Ah!” cry the Russian experts, “We’ve found the problem! The Americans have legalized war profiteering!” (This, by the way, is but one of many instances of something called systemic corruption, which is rife in the US.)

It would be one thing if each defense contractor simply took its cut off the top, but instead there is an entire food chain of defense contractors, all of which are legally required, no less, to maximize profits for their shareholders. More than 28,000 companies are involved, but the actual first-tier defense contractors with which the Pentagon places 2/3 of all defense contracts are just the Big Six: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynmics, BAE Systems and Boeing. All the other companies are organized into a pyramid of subcontractors with five levels of hierarchy, and at each level they do their best to milk the tier above them.

The insistence on market-based methods and the requirement of maximizing profitability turns out to be incompatible with defense spending on a very basic level: defense spending is intermittent and cyclical, with long fallow intervals between major orders. This has forced even the Big Six to make cuts to their defense-directed departments in favor of expanding civilian production. Also, in spite of the huge size of the US defense budget, it is of finite size (there being just one planet to blow up), as is the global weapons market. Since, in a market economy, every company faces the choice of grow or get bought out, this has precipitated scores of mergers and acquisitions, resulting in a highly consolidated marketplace with a few major players in each space.

As a result, in most spaces, of which the report’s authors discuss 17, including the Navy, land forces, air force, electronics, nuclear weapons, space technology and so on, at least a third of the time the Pentagon has a choice of exactly one contractor for any given contract, causing quality and timeliness to suffer and driving up prices.

In a number of cases, in spite of its industrial and financial might, the Pentagon has encountered insoluble problems. Specifically, it turns out that the US has only one shipyard left that is capable of building nuclear aircraft carriers (at all, that is; the USS Gerald Ford is not exactly a success). That is Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport, Virginia. In theory, it could work on three ships in parallel, but two of the slips are permanently occupied by existing aircraft carriers that require maintenance. This is not a unique case: the number of shipyards capable of building nuclear submarines, destroyers and other types of vessels is also exactly one. Thus, in case of a protracted conflict with a serious adversary in which a significant portion of the US Navy has been sunk, ships will be impossible to replace within any reasonable amount of time.

The situation is somewhat better with regard to aircraft manufacturing. The plants that exist can produce 40 planes a month and could produce 130 a month if pressed. On the other hand, the situation with tanks and artillery is absolutely dismal. According to this report, the US has completely lost the competency for building the new generation of tanks. It is no longer even a question of missing plant and equipment; in the US, a second generation of engineers who have never designed a tank is currently going into retirement. Their replacements have no one to learn from and only know about modern tanks from movies and video games. As far as artillery, there is just one remaining production line in the US that can produce barrels larger than 40mm; it is fully booked up and would be unable to ramp up production in case of war. The contractor is unwilling to expand production without the Pentagon guaranteeing at least 45% utilization, since that would be unprofitable.

The situation is similar for the entire list of areas; it is better for dual-use technologies that can be sourced from civilian companies and significantly worse for highly specialized ones. Unit cost for every type of military equipment goes up year after year while the volumes being acquired continuously trend lower—sometimes all the way to zero. Over the past 15 years the US hasn’t acquired a single new tank. They keep modernizing the old ones, but at a rate that’s no higher than 100 a year.

Because of all these tendencies and trends, the defense industry continues to lose not only qualified personnel but also the very ability to perform the work. INDPOL experts estimate that the deficit in machine tools has reached 27%. Over the past quarter-century the US has stopped manufacturing a wide variety of manufacturing equipment. Only half of these tools can be imported from allies or friendly nations; for the rest, there is just one source: China. They analyzed the supply chains for 600 of the most important types of weapons and found that a third of them have breaks in them while another third have completely broken down. In the Pentagon’s five-tier subcontractor pyramid, component manufacturers are almost always relegated to the bottommost tier, and the notices they issue when they terminate production or shut down completely tend to drown in the Pentagon’s bureaucratic swamp.

The end result of all this is that theoretically the Pentagon is still capable of doing small production runs of weapons to compensate for ongoing losses in localized, low-intensity conflicts during a general time of peace, but even today this is at the extreme end of its capabilities. In case of a serious conflict with any well-armed nation, all it will be able to rely on is the existing stockpile of ordnance and spare parts, which will be quickly depleted.

A similar situation prevails in the area of rare earth elements and other materials for producing electronics. At the moment, the accumulated stockpile of these supplies needed for producing missiles and space technology—most importantly, satellites—is sufficient for five years at the current rate of use.

The report specifically calls out the dire situation in the area of strategic nuclear weapons. Almost all the technology for communications, targeting, trajectory calculations and arming of the ICBM warheads was developed in the 1960s and 70s. To this day, data is loaded from 5-inch floppy diskettes, which were last mass-produced 15 years ago. There are no replacements for them and the people who designed them are busy pushing up daisies. The choice is between buying tiny production runs of all the consumables at an extravagant expense and developing from scratch the entire land-based strategic triad component at the cost of three annual Pentagon budgets.

There are lots of specific problems in each area described in the report, but the main one is loss of competence among technical and engineering staff caused by a low level of orders for replacements or for new product development. The situation is such that promising new theoretical developments coming out of research centers such as DARPA cannot be realized given the present set of technical competencies. For a number of key specializations there are fewer than three dozen trained, experienced specialists.

This situation is expected to continue to deteriorate, with the number of personnel employed in the defense sector declining 11-16% over the next decade, mainly due to a shortage of young candidates qualified to replace those who are retiring. A specific example: development work on the F-35 is nearing completion and there won’t be a need to develop a new jet fighter until 2035-2040; in the meantime, the personnel who were involved in its development will be idled and their level of competence will deteriorate.

Although at the moment the US still leads the world in defense spending ($610 billion of $1.7 trillion in 2017, which is roughly 36% of all the military spending on the planet) the US economy is no longer able to support the entire technology pyramid even in a time of relative peace and prosperity. On paper the US still looks like a leader in military technology, but the foundations of its military supremacy have eroded. Results of this are plainly visible:

• The US threatened North Korea with military action but was then forced to back off because it has no ability to fight a war against it.

• The US threatened Iran with military action but was then forced to back off because it has no ability to fight a war against it.

• The US lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban, and once the longest military conflict in US history is finally over the political situation there will return to status quo ante with the Taliban in charge and Islamic terrorist training camps back in operation.

• US proxies (Saudi Arabia, mostly) fighting in Yemen have produced a humanitarian disaster but have been unable to prevail militarily.

• US actions in Syria have led to a consolidation of power and territory by the Syrian government and newly dominant regional position for Russia, Iran and Turkey.

• The second-largest NATO power Turkey has purchased Russian S-400 air defense systems. The US alternative is the Patriot system, which is twice as expensive and doesn’t really work.

All of this points to the fact that the US is no longer much a military power at all. This is good news for at least the following four reasons.

First, the US is by far the most belligerent country on Earth, having invaded scores of nations and continuing to occupy many of them. The fact that it can’t fight any more means that opportunities for peace are bound to increase.

Second, once the news sinks in that the Pentagon is nothing more than a flush toilet for public funds its funding will be cut off and the population of the US might see the money that is currently fattening up war profiteers being spent on some roads and bridges, although it’s looking far more likely that it will all go into paying interest expense on federal debt (while supplies last).

Third, US politicians will lose the ability to keep the populace in a state of permanent anxiety about “national security.” In fact, the US has “natural security”—two oceans—and doesn’t need much national defense at all (provided it keeps to itself and doesn’t try to make trouble for others). The Canadians aren’t going to invade, and while the southern border does need some guarding, that can be taken care of at the state/county level by some good ol’ boys using weapons and ammo they already happen to have on hand. Once this $1.7 trillion “national defense” monkey is off their backs, ordinary American citizens will be able to work less, play more and feel less aggressive, anxious, depressed and paranoid.

Last but not least, it will be wonderful to see the war profiteers reduced to scraping under sofa cushions for loose change. All that the US military has been able to produce for a long time now is misery, the technical term for which is “humanitarian disaster.” Look at the aftermath of US military involvement in Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and what do you see? You see misery—both for the locals and for US citizens who lost their family members, had their limbs blown off, or are now suffering from PTSD or brain injury. It would be only fair if that misery were to circle back to those who had profited from it.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly19/moral-crisis7-19.html

Our Ruling Elites Have No Idea How Much We Want to See Them All in Prison Jumpsuits

Let's posit that America will confront a Great Crisis in the next decade. This is the presumption of The Fourth Turning, a 4-generational cycle of 80 years that correlates rather neatly with the Great Crises of the past: 1781 (Revolutionary War, constitutional crisis); 1861 (Civil War) and 1941 (World War II, global war).

What will be the next Great Crisis? Some anticipate another great-power war, others foresee another civil war, still others reckon a military coup is likely, and some view a collapse of the economy and U.S. dollar as inevitable.

While anything's possible, I propose a novel crisis unlike any in the past, a Moral Crisis in which the people challenge the power of the nation's corrupt Ruling Elites: not just elected officials, but the technocrats of the Deep State, the vested interests pillaging the nation, the New Overlords of Big Tech, the financier New Nobility, the Corporate Media and the self-serving state/corporate technocrat Nomenklatura who do the dirty work of the Ruling Elites.

Divide-and-Conquer has been the absurdly easy strategy of the Ruling Elites to fragment and disempower the citizenry. It's child's play for the Ruling Elites to ceaselessly promote a baker's dozen of divisive issues via the corporate media, and then watch the resulting conflicts split the citizenry into fragmented camps which subdivide further with every new toxic injection.

The one issue that could unite the fragmented citizenry is moral revulsion: As the Epstein case promises to reveal, there is literally no limit on the excesses and exploitations of the privileged few in America, no limit on what our Ruling Elites can do with absolute impunity.

The Nobility of the feudal era had some reciprocal obligation to its serfs; our New Nobility has no obligation to anyone but themselves. It is painfully obvious that there are two sets of laws in America: bankers can rip off billions and never serve time, and members of the Protected Class who sexually exploit children get a wrist-slap, if that.

Here's the sad reality: everybody in the Ruling Elites looked the other way: all the self-described "patriots" in the Intelligence services, all the technocrats in the Departments of Justice, State, etc., the Pentagon, and on and on. Everybody with any power knows the whole class of Ruling Elites is completely corrupt, by definition: to secure power in the U.S., you have to sell your soul to the Devil, one way or the other.

Like all Ruling Elites, America's Elites are absolutely confident in their power: this is hubris taken to new heights.

That the citizenry could finally have enough of their corrupt, self-serving Overlords does not seem in the realm of possibility to the Protected Few. There's always a way to lawyer-up and plea-bargain for a wrist-slap, a way to bend another "patriot" (barf), a way to offer a bribe cloaked as a plum position in a philanthro-capitalist NGO (non-governmental organization), and so on.

The possibility that moral outrage could spark a revolt seems improbable in such a distracted culture, but consider the chart below: even the most distracted, fragmented tribe of the peasantry eventually notices that they're not in the top 1%, or the top 0.1%, and that the Ruling Elites have overseen an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the few at the expense of the many:

Our Ruling Elites have no idea how many of us already want to see them all in prison jumpsuits, and they also have no idea how fast the moral revulsion with their corrupt "leadership" might spread. Scanning the distracted, consumerist rabble from the great heights of their wealth and power, they reckon the capacity for moral outrage is limited, leaving them safe from any domestic crusade.

They also trust that the citizenry can be further fragmented, further distracted, and so they will continue to be invulnerable. Or worst case scenario, a few especially venal villains will need to be sacrificed, and then all will return to the bliss of Neofeudal exploitation.

But they may have misread the American citizenry, just as they've misread history.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-economic-military-terrorism/5682702

US Economic and Military Terrorism

Sanctions and tariffs are favored economic US weapons of war by other means, especially the former. They’re used to inflict economic pain and collective punishment.

The Vienna-based International Progress Organization calls sanctions “an illegitimate form of collective punishment of the weakest and poorest members of society, the infants, the children, the chronically ill, and the elderly.”

According to the Treasury Department, they’re imposed on Russia, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Sudan, Cuba, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Iran, and other countries — as well as against entities and individuals in targeted countries.

Threats usually precede and accompany US actions — including unacceptable demands no responsible leadership would accept.

The Sino/US face-off is far more than about trade. Michael Hudson calls major differences between both countries “a full-fledged Cold War 2.0,” adding:

“At stake is whether China will agree to do what Russia did in the 1990s: put a Yeltsin-like puppet of neoliberal planners in place to shift control of its economy from its government to the US financial sector and its planners.”

“So the fight really is over what kind of planning China and the rest of the world should have: by governments to raise prosperity, or by the financial sector to extract revenue and impose austerity.”

The US aims “to gain financial control of global resources and make trade ‘partners’ pay interest, licensing fees and high prices for products in which the United States enjoys monopoly pricing “rights’ for intellectual property.”

“A trade war thus aims to make other countries dependent on US-controlled food, oil, banking and finance, or high-technology goods whose disruption will cause austerity and suffering until the trade ‘partner’ surrenders.”

Simply put, the US seeks dominance over all other nations, their resources and populations, wanting Yeltsin-like puppets installed everywhere serving its interests — why wars by other means and hot wars are waged, ongoing against multiple countries.

China’s Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Hanhui earlier accused the US of “naked economic terrorism, economic homicide, (and) economic bullying” — indicating how far apart both countries are on major issues, Beijing not about to bend to unacceptable Trump regime demands.

Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif slammed the White House the same way, earlier saying:

“If the United States decides to cause so much pain on the Iranian people by imposing economic warfare, by engaging in economic terrorism against Iran, then there will be consequences,” without elaborating, adding:

“We don’t differentiate between economic war and military war. The US is engaged in war against us, and a war is painful to our participants.”

“We have a very clear notion that in a war, nobody wins. In a war, everybody loses…the loss of some…greater than (for) others.”

“(W)e exercise our (right of) self-defense…(Trump) announced that he is engaged in a war and economic war against Iran, and we have an obligation to defend our people against that economic war.”

He’ll fail to “achieve his policy objectives through pressure” and other toughness. His tactics may work in “real estate,” not “in dealing with Iran” — geopolitics and business world’s apart.

Nor will US toughness work against Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and other countries.

Under Republicans and undemocratic Dems, two right wings of the US war party, the nation is increasingly viewed as a pariah state, making more enemies than friends by forcing its will on other nations.

Hubris and arrogance are self-defeating longer-term. The US is a declining superpower in an increasingly multi-polar world, its post-WW II supremacy fading — despite spending countless trillions of dollars to remain dominant globally.

It’s the same dynamic that doomed all other empires in history, no exceptions, nor will the US be one – a nation in decline because of its hubris and arrogance, waging endless wars against invented enemies, and hardwired unwillingness to change.

The nation I grew up in before, during, and after WW II no longer exists — replaced by the imperial state, military Keynesianism, ruinous military spending, and endless wars of aggression against nations threatening no one while vital homeland needs go begging.

If humanity survives, an ominous uncertainty, America’s epitaph one day may read the nation was consumed by its unattainable imperial rage for dominion over planet earth.

The US no longer is the world’s sole superpower, not even the leading one.

Russian super-weapons outmatch the Pentagon’s best, developed at a small fraction of the cost — intended solely for defense, never preemptively against another nation the way the US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial partners operate.

If attacked, Iran will exact a heavy cost on the US. The imperial state is no match against Russia’s super-weapons. Nor would it fare well against China’s growing military might.

After endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, conflicts rage without resolution.

If Washington left its puppet Kabul regime on its own, unaided by Pentagon forces, it would fall in short order, the same likely true in Yemen if Western weapons sales and support for Saudi terror-bombing ended.

The same can be said about other countries where US-installed or supported regimes cling to power with US military aid.

Like most of his predecessors, Trump is captive to dark forces controlling him, a businessman/TV personality transformed into a warrior president, escalating inherited wars, heading toward another against Iran if the world community doesn’t stop the madness.

World peace and humanity’s survival depend on whether the US can be contained. Its endless wars may destroy us all if a way isn’t found to stop them.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51934.htm

The World is Dedollarizing

What if tomorrow nobody but the Unites States would use the US-dollar? Every country, or society would use their own currency for internal and international trade, their own economy-based, non-fiat currency. It could be traditional currencies or new government controlled crypto-currencies, but a country’s own sovereign money. No longer the US-dollar. No longer the dollar’s foster child, the Euro. No longer international monetary transactions controlled by US banks and – by the US-dollar controlled international transfer system, SWIFT, the system that allows and facilitates US financial and economic sanctions of all kinds – confiscation of foreign funds, stopping trades between countries, blackmailing ‘unwilling’ nations into submission. What would happen? – Well, the short answer is that we would certainly be a step close to world peace, away from US (financial) hegemony, towards nation states’ sovereignty, towards a world geopolitical structure of more equality.

We are not there yet. But graffities are all over the walls signaling that we are moving quite rapidly in that direction. And Trump knows it and his handlers know it – which is why the onslaught of financial crime – sanctions – trade wars – foreign assets and reserves confiscations – all in the name of “Make America Great Again”, is accelerating exponentially and with impunity. What is surprising is that the Anglo-Saxon hegemons do not seem to understand that all the threats, sanctions, trade barriers, are provoking the contrary to what should contribute to American Greatness. Economic sanctions, in whatever form, are effective only as long as the world uses the US dollar for trading and as reserve currency.

Once the world gets sick and tired of the grotesque dictate of Washington and the sanction schemes for those who do no longer want to go along with the oppressive rules of the US, they will be eager to jump on another boat, or boats – abandoning the dollar and valuing their own currencies. Meaning trading with each other in their own currencies – and that outside of the US banking system which so far even controls trading in local currencies, as long as funds have to be transferred from one nation to another via SWIFT.

Many countries have also realized that the dollar is increasingly serving to manipulate the value of their economy. The US-dollar, a fiat currency, by its sheer money mass, may bend national economies up or down, depending in which direction the country is favored by the hegemon. Let’s put the absurdity of this phenomenon in perspective.

Today, the dollar is based not even on hot air and is worth less than the paper it is printed on. The US GDP is US$ 21.1 trillion in 2019 (World Bank estimate), with current debt of 22.0 trillion, or about 105% of GDP. According to Forbes, about US$ 210 trillion are “unfunded liabilities” (net present value of future projected but unfunded obligations (75 years), mainly social security, Medicaid and accumulated interest on debt), a figure about 10 times the US GDP. This figure keeps growing, as interest on debt is compounded, forming part of what would be called in business terms ‘debt service’ (interest and debt amortization), but is never ‘paid back’. In addition, there are about one to two quadrillion dollars (nobody knows the exact amount) of so-called derivatives floating around the globe. A derivative is a financial instrument which creates its value from the speculative difference of underlying assets, most commonly derived from such inter-banking and stock exchange oddities, like ‘futures’, ‘options’, ‘forwards’ and ‘swaps’.

This monstrous debt is partly owned in the form of treasury bonds as foreign exchange reserves by countries around the world. The bulk of it is owed by the US to itself – with no plan to ever “pay it back” – but rather create more money, more debt, with which to pay for the non-stop wars, weapon manufacturing and lie-propaganda to keep the populace quiet and in the game.

This amounts to a humongous worldwide dollar-based pyramid system. Imagine, this debt comes crashing down, for example because one or several big (Wall Street) banks are on the brink of bankruptcy, so, they claim their outstanding derivatives, paper gold (another banking absurdity) and other debt from smaller banks. It would generate a chain reaction that might bring down the whole dollar-dependent world economy. It would create an exponential “Lehman Brothers 2008” on global scale.

The world is increasingly aware of this real threat, an economy built on a house of cards – and countries want to get out of the trap, out of the fangs of the US-dollar. It’s not easy with all the dollar-denominated reserves and assets invested abroad, all over the globe. A solution may be gradually divesting them (US-dollar liquidity and investments) and moving into non-dollar dependent currencies, like the Chinese Yuan and the Russian Ruble, or a basket of eastern currencies that are delinked from the dollar and its international payment scheme, the SWIFT system. Beware of the Euro, it’s the foster child of the US-dollar!

There are increasingly blockchain technology alternatives available. China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela are already experimenting with government-controlled cryptocurrencies to build new payment and transfer systems outside the US-dollar domain to circumvent sanctions. India may or may not join this club – whenever the Modi Government decides which way to bend – east or west. The logic would suggest that India orients herself to the east, as India is a significant part of the huge Eurasian economic market and landmass.

India is already an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – an association of countries that are developing peaceful strategies for trade, monetary security and defense, comprising China, Russia, India, Pakistan, most Central Asian countries and with Iran waiting in the wings to become a full-fledged member. As such, SCO accounts for about half of the world population and a third of the world’s economic output. The east has no need for the west to survive. No wonder that western media hardly mention the SCO which means that the western public at large has no clue what the SCO stands for, and who are its members.

Government-controlled and regulated blockchain technology may become key to counter US coercive financial power and to resist sanctions. Any country is welcome to join this new alliance of countries and new but fast-growing approach to alternative trading – and to finding back to national political and financial sovereignty.

In the same vein of dedollarization are Indian “barter banks”. They are, for example, trading Indian tea for Iranian oil. Such arrangements for goods to be exchanged against Iranian petrol are carried out through Indian “barter banks”, where currencies, i.e. Iranian rials and Indian rupees, are handled by the same bank. Exchange of goods is based on a list of highest monetary volume Indian trade items, against Iranian hydrocarbon products, for example, Iran’s large import of Indian tea. No monetary transaction takes place outside of India, therefore, US sanctions may be circumvented, since no US bank or US Treasury interference can stop the bilateral trade activities.

Despite US and EU sanctions, German investments in Russia are breaking a 10-year record in 2019, by German business pouring more than €1.7 billion into the Russian economy in the first three months of 2019. According to the Russian-German Chamber of Commerce, the volume of German companies’ investments in Russia is up by 33% – by € 400 million – since last year, when total investments reached € 3.2 billion, the largest since 2008. Despite sanctions which amounted to about € 1 billion combined for 140 German companies surveyed and registered with the Chamber of Commerce, and despite western anti-Russia pressure, Russia-German trade has increased by 8.4 percent and reached nearly € 62 billion in 2018.

In addition, notwithstanding US protests and threats with sanctions, Moscow and Berlin continue their Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project which is expected to be finished before the end of 2019. Not only is the proximity of Russian gas a natural and logical supply source for Germany and Europe, it will also bring Europe independence form the bullying sales methods of the United States. And payments will not be made in US dollars. In the long-run, the benefits of German-Russian business and economic relations will far outweigh the illegal US sanctions. Once this awareness has sunk in, there is nothing to stop Russian-German business associations to flourish, and to attract other EU-Russian business relations – all outside of the dollar-dominated banking and transfer system.

President Trump’s trade war with China will eventually also have a dedollarization effect, as China will seek – and already has acquired – other trading partners, mostly Asian, Asian-Pacific and European – with whom China will deal in other than dollar-denominated contracts and outside the SWIFT transfer system, for example using the Chinese International Payment System (CIPS) which, by the way, is open for international trade by any country across the globe.

This will not only circumvent punishing tariffs on China’s exports (and make US customers of Chinese goods furious, as their Chinese merchandise is no longer available at affordable prices, or no longer available at all), but this strategy will also enhance the Chinese Yuan on international markets and boost the Yuan even further as a reliable reserve currency – ever outranking the US-dollar. In fact, in the last 20 years, dollar-denominated assets in international reserve coffers have declined from more than 90% to below 60% and will rapidly decline further as Washington’s coercive financial policies prevail. Dollar reserves are rapidly replaced by reserves in Yuan and gold, and that even in such staunch supporters of the west as is Australia.

Washington also has launched a counter-productive financial war against Turkey, because Turkey is associating and creating friendly relations with Russia, Iran and China – and, foremost, because Turkey, a NATO stronghold, is purchasing the Russian S-400 cutting-edge air defense system – a new military alliance which the US cannot accept. As a result, the US is sabotaging the Turkish currency, the Lira which has lost 40% since January 2018.

Turkey will certainly do whatever it can to get out from under the boot of the US-dollar stranglehold and currency sanctions – and further ally itself with the East. This amounts to a double loss for the US. Turkey will most likely abandon all trading in US dollars and align her currency with, for example, the Chinese Yuan and the Russian ruble, and, to the detriment of the Atlantic alliance, Turkey may very likely exit NATO. Abandoning NATO will be a major disaster for the US, as Turkey is both strategically, as well as in terms of NATO military power one of the strongest – if not the strongest – nation of the 29 NATO members, outside of the US.

If Turkey exits NATO, the entire European NATO alliance will be shaken and questioned. Other countries, long wary of NATO and of storing NATO’s nuclear weapons on their soils, especially Italy and Germany, may also consider exiting NATO. In both Germany and Italy, a majority of the people is against NATO and especially against the Pentagon waging wars form their NATO bases in their territories in Germany in Italy.

To stem against this trend, the former German Defense Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, from the conservative German CDU party, is being groomed to become Jean-Claude Juncker’s successor as President of the European Commission. Mr. Juncker served since 2014. Ms. Von der Leyen was voted in tonight, 17 July, with a narrow margin of 9 votes. She is a staunch supporter of NATO. Her role is to keep NATO as an integral part of the EU. In fact, as it stands today, NATO is running the EU. This may change, once people stand up against NATO, against the US vassal, the EU Administration in Brussels, and claim their democratic rights as citizens of their nation states.

Europeans sense that these Pentagon initiated and ongoing wars and conflicts, supported by Washington’s European puppet allies, may escalate into a nuclear war, their countries’ NATO bases will be the first ones to be targeted, sinking Europe for the 3rd time in 100 year into a world war. However, this one may be all-destructive nuclear – and nobody knows or is able to predict the damage and destruction of such a catastrophe, nor the time of recovery of Mother Earth from an atomic calamity.

So, let’s hope Turkey exits NATO. It would be giant step towards peace and a healthy answer to Washington’s blackmail and sabotage against Turkey’s currency. The US currency sanctions are, in the long run, a blessing. It gives Turkey a good argument to abandon the US dollar and gradually shift towards association with eastern moneys, mainly the Chinese Yuan, thereby putting another nail in the US-dollar’s coffin.

However, the hardest blow for Washington will be when Turkey exits NATO. Such a move will come sooner or later, notwithstanding Ms. Von der Leyen’s battle cries for NATO. The breaking up of NATO will annihilate the western power structure in Europe and throughout the world, where the US still maintains more than 800 military bases. On the other hand, the disbanding of NATO will increase the world’s security, especially in Europe – for all the consequences such an exit will bear. Exiting NATO and economically exiting the US-dollar orbit is a further step towards dedollarization, and a blow to US financial and military hegemony.

Finally, investments of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road, will be mostly made in Yuan and local currencies of the countries involved and incorporated in one or more of the several BRI land and maritime routes that eventually will span the globe. Some US-dollar investments may serve the People’s Bank of China, China’s Central Bank, as a dollar-divesting tool of China’s huge dollar reserves which currently stands at close to two trillion dollars.

The BRI promises to become the next economic revolution, a non-dollar economic development scheme, over the coming decades, maybe century, connecting peoples and countries – cultures, research and teaching without, however, forcing uniformity, but promoting cultural diversity and human equality – and all of it outside the dollar dynasty, breaking the nefarious dollar hegemony.