Back in the ancient times, if you wished to buy product from someone you arrived at their location with money, or they arrived at your location with product. The product was inspected, and the money was inspected. Once both sides were satisfied, the exchange was made, and the deal was done. It did not take long for a class of middlemen to turn up who brokered such deals. They inspected the goods, arranged transportation and safeguarded the product and the money.
World trade has not changed much since the ancient times. Middlemen still facilitate most of the trade. They are called banks, insurance companies, freight brokers, shipping companies and so forth, but they are all part of this vast and essential middleman economy that makes it possible for the local Walmart to have shelves stuffed with goods from Asia. It is what makes it possible for the Chinese company selling dog food to get paid by Walmart.
One thing to note about this setup is the two greatest seafaring nations in the history of the planet, the United States and Britain, do very little shipping. Instead, they control the flow of goods around the world through control of the insurance markets and the financial system used in global trade. If you are involved in global trade, you are certainly using the American financial system and either directly or indirectly the British maritime insurance system.
The dollar being the world’s reserve currency has been to this point the main driver of the explosion in global trade. The buyer in South America can do business with a seller in China, because his bank is connected to the American financial system through his country’s central bank. He does not have to get RMB from his bank to pay the Chinese vendors, because the exchange is done automatically through the dollar dominated global financial system.
This is about to change with the launch of an alternative payment system that was announced at the BRICS summit in Kazan Russia. The Russians and the Chinese have been working on creating an alternative to SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is the platform that networks the world’s banks to facilitate the flow of money around the world. The new system seeks to replace SWIFT for trade among the BRICS countries.
For most people this is an eye-glazing topic, but in the fullness of time it could be an event that generations of historians study as an inflection point. What the BRICS countries are seeking to do is wrest control of the global financial system from the West, specifically the English-speaking countries, at least for the members of BRICS and those countries willing to trade with BRICS. By extension, it is an effort to reduce the power of the dollar and thus the power of the American empire.
What this new system proposes to do is make it easier for participating countries to conduct business in the currency of other participating countries. Instead of China needing dollars to buy oil from the Saudis and therefore preferring dollars from other countries for Chinese goods, the Chinese will be able to buy oil in RMB and the Saudis will be able to buy Chinese goods in whatever currency they possess. The new system would handle the conversion and exchange rates instantly.
As an aside, that last part is interesting. In the United States, a business does not get paid by the credit card company for a few days. Often, the delay is longer. Of course, there are fees for taking credit card payments. In Russia and China, the movement of money is instant. The system is treated as a public utility, so fees are relatively small compared to what we see in the West. This is owing to much better and newer technology and a different attitude toward banking.
That aside, the significance of this proposal is enormous. The BRICS countries represent half the world’s population. The Arab oil countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, are onboard for this new system. The Saudis let expire the fifty-year-old deal with Washington that established the petrodollar. China, India and Russia are the driving force behind this new arrangement and represent three of the most important economic powerhouses in the world at the moment.
What this means for the West is far less influence over the rest of the world through the control of the financial system. The main reason China, Russia and India have pushed for this new system is they have grown weary of Washington abusing its position to bully the rest of the world. The sanctions war unleashed by Washington against Russia in 2022 was the final straw. If Washington would use the dollar to try regime change in Russia, it would do it to anyone, especially China.
What the BRICS summit in Kazan represents is decades of belligerently incompetent foreign policy in Washington. Ten years ago, it was inconceivable that these important countries would come together to create a parallel financial system, as all of them were committed to the dollar and the Western system. They were committed to the “rules-based order” because they assumed it served their interests, but decades of abuse by Washington has convinced them otherwise.
What this means for the West is clear. What we see forming up is a trading and cooperation block that includes all the countries outside the West, representing the bulk of the world’s population and the majority of economic activity. Add in the fact that the West has let its manufacturing base shrivel and seems to be at war with its agricultural base and you can see the problem. Economies based in providing services tied to the financial system are facing a cliff now.
For the United States, this could not come at a worse time. Debt is already at staggering levels and is accelerating. The productive and innovative portion of the population is aging, while the unproductive portion is exploding. Add in decades of infrastructure neglect, the demographic and cultural catastrophes, and now is not a good time for a decline in the dollar. America is an empire that debased its currency via the perfidious subversion of its own rules.
Contrary to some claims, the dollar is not about to collapse, but what Kazan signals is the steady decline in the dollar. As the rest of the world begins to trade outside the dollar, it means dollars and instruments denominated in dollars, like debt, will lose value on the global market. This means the American banking system must slow the creation of dollars to prevent inflation. This means the cost of borrowing dollars must go up and stay up in anticipation of declining dollar demand
The steady decline of the dollar means a steady decline in the American standard of living, baring a revolution in Washington. Being the world’s mint and banker only works if the world accepts what you are minting. A rentier economy reliant on skimming from every transaction is only possible if you control the currency. The parasitism that has become a feature of our economy is going to become more obvious. That will bring political consequences as well.
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When I was Bankstering SWIFT was understood to mean Some Wankers Idea of Funds Transfer.
The sad part is that America didn’t need move towards this dead end…We didn’t need to outsource manufacturing, or bring in foreign workers, or open the borders to savages who are living off our taxpayers..We allowed the first two for the express purpose of lowering wages, and making more money for corporations…We allowed the border disaster for political reasons, mainly to capture the single, childless, female vote…As Trump has sort of pointed out, the period before the income tax when the Feds depended on tariffs for financing, was the most prosperous in American history….
The impoverishment of the country is a process that has been going on for awhile. I sometimes point out to my family that what they perceive as an increasing cost of living is actually a sign of increasing poverty. If what you buy goes up 10% in cost but your wages only go up 5%, you are objectively poorer. You can cover up the difference by going into debt but that makes the problem worse in the long run, as the debt must be repaid with interest or discharged through bankruptcy. If enough people/businesses can’t repay their debts, you get an economic crash, which is something like a national bankruptcy. In times past, when the country had a productive industrial economy, the national bankruptcy could be discharged through wealth creation. We no longer have such an economy and the recovery from such a crash will be long and leave us poorer overall. Take away the dollar as reserve currency and what will be left after the crash is a Third World nation. Many of cities already resemble such nations.
Pingback: The Kazan Catastrophe |
Sundance at CTH offers an interesting perspective on the sanctions against Russia:
They are not intended to keep Russia out, but are intended to keep us, the citizens in the West, in.
The end goal is a government issued digital currency, which will, of course, be used to keep us, the proles, in line. Step out of line, and they can not only take all your funds, but they can prevent anyone from giving you any.
It should be noted that India and China are enemies. Each one of the BRICS will want to be the true power behind the throne. I’m not as optimistic about their chances because they will squabble. OPEC has this problem.
The West still has the biggest strategic advantage, which is common ancestry and a somewhat common language. You can get pretty far along in Europe on English alone.
The acronyms of BRICS speak Spanish, Russian, Hindu, Mandarin, and English. No common history. No cultural bonds. If you think white people are a pain in the ass these days, we got nothing on that Star Wars cantina club.
The question that remains for me is whether the lizard people running the west are actually trying to help BRICS succeed. To meet their bizarre “climate” goals, they have to massively depopulate and deflate their economies. A way to do that is to create an alternative.
That’s how China ended up with ICBM MIRV technology. Clinton didn’t like the US military advantage, so he gave China MIRV technology which accelerated their space capabilities by about 25 years.
I would be unsurprised to learn that one of these WEF-like pod people forums is helping BRICS.
“This means the American banking system must slow the creation of dollars to prevent inflation”
OR what is far more likely is that they’ll keep pumping out dollars (or ramp it up(, then change the calculation for inflation (again) and have their mouthpieces in the media lie and gaslight and say, “well actually inflation isn’t that high rube. Because the Secretary of Treatury says so,” While you’re staring at a loaf of bread that’s doubled in price in the past year.
Might work on Americans. Won’t work on those international green eyeshade types. A bushel of grain that is mispriced because of inflation fraud will be arbitraged.
In summary,
Jews are an albatross around the White Man’s neck.
And we are very close to the Iceberg.
Let’s suppose for a minute that you’re correct about the albatross. Who keeps it there?
The albatross isn’t very intelligent, and it’s greatly outnumbered, by ten or more to one. Its main strategic advantage appears to be a national culture perpetuated with a national literature that gullible White Man often believes is about him, too, even though it’s not.
My working theory is that they are insane.
Hyperphobic of all any any potential threats and either largely cut off and cloistered from the rest of society, or.. for the one’s who aren’t cloistered… they have drank from the same poisoned well and are afflicted by Jim Jones disease, a.k.a. “Tabula Rasa” theory.
Which sounds nice to women, but it’s not reality.
Them being a matriarchally predisposed culture is also definitely a factor.
And also, duh.
The media keeps it up there.
But who believes the media anymore after all they have done?
And they have already lost academia. Golems turned.
Christian ministers of every sect and Christology, trinitarian and not, have been keeping it there for more than 1,000 years. Even this blog’s author is clinging desperately to the albatross. He thinks a new Christianity is part of the answer.
anyone here agree with me that looking just at elections only tells part of the story? Like the story goes that the democrats were losing a lot of elections by a lot (see Walter Mondale) and they needed to find someone to run who was more palatable to mainstream audiences to win. It wasn’t until Bill Clinton that they found that someone.
But my view is that this is the wrong way of looking at things. I feel 40 years ago, Harris would have lost the PV by a margin worse than Mondale. And the fact she’s on pace to, worst case scenario, lose the popular vote by a 3-4 margin, shows that something beyond demographics has changed. That fact alone I think is the real story.
I don’t know what to think about this one. On the one hand, dollar hegemony benefits me so I don’t want to see it end. On the other hand, I don’t like the people in our government who has been misusing our position in the world.
Looks like the Khazar catastrophe led to the Kazan catastrophe.
Day dreaming that the BRICS cartel grows in power enough to demand the physical persons of the western banking cartel families and presents public tribunals listing their volumes of crimes against humanity before pronouncing their richly deserved death sentences. Member nation Saudi Arabia graciously volunteers to carry out this service for the worlds’ peoples in their usual way. That would make a great x-tube insta-toc video… ‘Sau-di-style’ to the beat of the sound of scimitar chopping and dancing people from all over the world. Without masks this time. A new chapter in the mythology of eternal victimhood is born The Kazan Khazarian Katastrophe.
It is a beautiful thought.
It’s my impression that a lot of people here don’t intend to vote, either on the perception that it’s a waste of time because it makes no difference, or because it actively harms by giving an legitimacy to and participating in the GAE.
But I do invite anyone reading this to vote, especially if you are registered (or can still register) in one of the seven battleground states.
1. Even if the Leviathan is gonna Leviathan no matter who is gets elected, most people on all sides interpret a vote for Trump as a middle finger to the Beast
2. It’s a two or three hours if you have long lines, but for for me and probably many others, it’s like half an hour. You could easily spend more time dealing with a clogged sink on a given day.
3. Obviously 2017-2021there didn’t “make America great again”, but it did slow down the constant massive pozzing of the Obama and Biden regimes
4. There are ways a Trump presidency will make a tangible difference. One example: if Cackles wins, the nightmare will continue and perhaps worsen for the Jan 6th prisoners (as well as the zersetsung of so many others like Guliani, Eastman, etc). If Trump wins, the Jan 6ers will probably be released.
I’ve been back and forth in my mind for months about this, whether or not to bother, and why. And with 12 days to go, I’m coming around to the sentiment that this is the only legal means I possess to potentially cause pain to the shitlibs.
Respect, I hope you do vote.
To me, consistently each election voting for the candidate available who is closest to “based”/the populist right is like putting a tool away after using it rather than leaving it out on the counter, or taking a break during the work day to walk around the block instead of play a game on one’s phone. By itself, it’s not going to change much, but living a good life consists of many small actions like that.
Military battles consist of a huge number of small unit actions that add up to battles won and lost. We can all wait for an American Pinochet suddenly arriving and in one grand swoop setting everything straight. But, meanwhile, what are the actions, however small, that we can take in the war.
The chief question is, failing a landslide one way or the other, does the vote even matter? It seems fairly clear to me that the Power Structure will install whomsoever it desires regardless of the actual vote tallies. But it does appear possible that Trump and the PS have cut some kind of a deal that would allow him back into the Anti-White House.
While entirely plausible or even probable, such considerations are irrelevant to my motivation
They are relevant because you can’t stick it to the shitlib if your vote is meaningless. If Trump is installed it will be the Power Structure that is doing the sticking.
But I feel yer pain. My wife has done plenty of pouting since I told her I wasn’t voting. The power of “civic responsiblity” is not to be discounted.
Ostei – if I understand you correctly, you seem to think that the numbers we see in tallies are close to made up. If so, I can understand such a sentiment. I think that we’re not quite there yet though. The regime has been hemorrhaging legitimacy for years now, and I suspect that if there is clear daylight between Trump and Cackles, rather than obviously rigging again and needing to solely resort to hard power, they’ll let him win and turn to plan B.
In other words – your vote does matter and I hope you use it.
Certainly, the larger the vote-gap, the harder it is for the Power Structure to fortify Our Democracy. Is the gap large enough to obviate fortification? I have my doubts. But if it is, my vote is unnecessary anyway. And I don’t live in a swing state.
Many libs make a big deal out of the total national popular vote, and there’s armies of just-nationalized peasants in big cities who can’t speak English and are on public assistance to run up their numbers. You could help counterbalance that.
Are these choke points on world trade American? Or jewish?
Zman covered all the bases. I have no additional insights except to emphasize this one:
“What the BRICS summit in Kazan represents is decades of belligerently incompetent foreign policy in Washington.”
The arrogant recklessness of failing to negotiate with Russia in good faith before the Ukraine war, then the belligerent interference in the war pushed the Russians into alliance with China, and now India and the rest.
And instead of recognizing the threat this poses to Western Prosperity the ruling class doubles down on its arrogance and aggression. We are doomed.
Well, if the Blackberry Fruitcake Empire can no longer bully and browbeat other nations into submission with their control of the fattest wad, then it will find it much more difficult to use its military to impose its cultural agenda as well. Consequently, the world will be more chaotic, but also less depraved and perverse. I think that’s a good trade.
There is something concerning China that is missing from most conversations about world trade and the historic dominance of the West, particularly of the US$. Our dominance began with the great explorations of the 16th century, and there was another surge of dominance that started in the 18th century with the industrial revolution. That block party is about over. The convergence of Asian prosperity with the Western economic system was supercharged by the emergence of Chinese economic strength. From about 500 B.C. until the early 17th century, China was the world’s wealthiest nation. The last 500 years of Western economic hegemony has been an aberration. History is simply about to return to its accustomed patterns. Like a sleeping volcano, the Eurasian landmass is awakening once more.
Europe was wealthier(per capita) as early as the 14th century. I think the Roman empire was wealthier than China or India. Your account is tied to the lie that Europe became wealthy through colonialism.
If you convert wealth of that era into US 1990 dollars per purchasing parity then one can state that in 1500 Italy had 1100 versus China 600,India 550.
More detail : Italy 1100,France 724,England 714,HRE 688,Spain 661,China 600,India 550,Japan 500, Ottomans 496, Egypt 475.
At the risk of sounding crude, that’s Jew Money Talk though. Leavened with a bit of Boomer Prosperity Gospel.
In 1500 nobody feared Florence. Selim the Grim was another matter entirely: he could out-arm and out-man any single European state and plenty of them severally. A generation or so later France was cutting deals with his successor Suleiman the Magnificent to @#$% over the Hapsburgs and wintering his huge fleet in Toulon to the disgust and horror of the rest of ‘Christendom’.
Whether or not a coal miner in Shaanxi is richer or poorer than one in Appalachia is moot. (I’d put my money on the one in Shaanxi having more chance of sending his kid to college, but that’s just me… I’m a PRC shill at times). Or are you richer in Shanghai because you can get the clean and shiny subway at midnight sans hallucinating shit stained negroes pushing you onto the tracks?
What matters is who has the greater useful and usable military throw weight and who makes and trades more stuff than the other and whose word is more or less their bond in diplomacy and trade. Now you might have some prejudices about Chinese duplicity and sharp trading practices, but ask yourself how the rest of the world sees the USA in the Current Year. Respect matters.
The other thing about China and have to grudgingly admit India too is that both of the have truly understood in the (3g4me trigger warning) grok sense the Glubb Pasha 250 year dynastic cycle and have survived many multiples of these. The first sentence of the classic Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms beings thusly:
Every Chinese knows this by heart. Inevitably something as yet unknown will take them down in the next century or so just as we are being taken down right now for reasons we only dimly grasp. But they’ll be back. Again and again. Will we? That’s the real question.
A lot of words with little effect and not addressing my main point about how Europe was not some dirt-poor backwater. Maybe if you were less allergic to facts you would be aware of China’s ridiculously poor military history only overshadowed in ineptitude by that of India.
As for your mighty Ottomans ,they would soon be thrashed at Lepanto by a mostly Spanish fleet which would be subsequently put to the sword by the English. The French betraying Europe with the Ottomans is much more an indicator of their perfidiousness than a sign of the superiority of the Ottomans over Europe.
So much for your claims of the military power of the non European polities .
When you respond to someone try to respond to what they said rather than the argument you wish they stated.I don’t mind you being crude it’s the retardation I find irritating.
“What the BRICS summit in Kazan represents is decades of belligerently incompetent foreign policy in Washington.”
Perfect. And Biden/Harris are the epitome of this. At least Trump is a realist businessman.
However, a major problem I see for BRICS is lack of trust among its members. Almost mutual hatred in some cases (China-India). And these “economic miracles” have been built on access to the gigantic American and European markets. I also note basket-case South Africa is the “S” in BRICS (for “Shithole”, presumably): are they going to replace demand from California and Germany in the event of a West vs BRICS trade war? With their 40% unemployment and decaying infrastructure?
BRICS is Russia and China. The rest are there to provide “global south” cover. They’re piggybacking the West’s anti-Western propaganda. China may be doing it entirely cynically, but it’s hard to tell. (How would that differ from just acting Chinese?) Putin is a true believer who wants to see the white world brown out.
brits losing insurance monoploy
americrats losing finance monopoly
both were not the middlemen but effectively used naval power to make middlemen safe to ply the seas (for a small cost of doing what we want (using our insurance and finance mostly kek)).
does the loss of naval security we provided figure in here as well?
“He does not have to get RMB from his bank to pay the Chinese vendors, because the exchange is done automatically through the dollar dominated global financial system.”
Don’t forget Hong Kong. All of the trade through China goes through HK. It is Hong Kong who handles all the currency stuff for Chinese trade. This is one of the things that made Hong Kong so wealthy.
Bingo. That and the cherry on top is transfer pricing: Hong Kong has a bunch of container terminals, so all you need to do is export from your China factory to Hong Kong at Price A (booking some profit to be taxed inside the PRC in RMB at ~25%) and then export from Hong Kong at Price (A+whatever) in freely convertible US dollar pegged Hong Kong Dollars taxed at 0%. You can then send your US$ anywhere in the world *or* ‘reinvest’ them back into the PRC under some ‘foreign investment’ dodge. What’s not to like? 😀
That’s my kindergarten level understanding of just one of the smaller rackets enabled by having a non-freely convertible currency with conversion permitted in only a limited number of ways and locations. Seems all a bit sleazy, but then compare it to what ‘free trade’ has done to the USA and Rest of the West.
Macau is an interesting place. It’s the gambling steam release valve for the PRC of course. But it’s also where the various East and South-East Asian underworlds settle their (literal, as in books) accounts. With all that cash sloshing around and nicely laundered casino checks for the leftover unmatched amounts at the end of each accounting process, it’s the right place to set up an offsetting shop where everyone settles up with everyone else.
Our rulers’ frittering away the reserve status of the U.S. dollar has much in common with their people trafficking. They bring in a few million impoverished third-world migrants overnight. Life goes on almost as if nothing has changed, since their productive first-world population still returns to work the next day. And they get to feel all virtuous. That is, until the latter retire or are replaced through affirmative action, whereupon they could find themselves living in another South Africa with no managerial slots reserved for folks of their skin color. Likewise, sacrificing the dollar’s global trade status on the altar of sanctions will have little immediate impact. Our elites can wallow unperturbed in their disdain for Putin, Xi, etc. Unfortunately, their offshoring of American industry over the past few decades means that when the world’s appetite for dollars does eventually wane, they will have very limited ability to satisfy their helots’ demand for goods. All the property heaped up through seignorage could become more of a target than a status symbol. What are the odds they’ll ditch “our democracy” for the protection of a caudillo?
So have any of you financial wizzes got a way for me to try and make money out of this development?
I can’t see a simple solution like buying some new type of crypto currency, and that’s about the extent of my expertise in this area.
Start a new religion. Endeavour not to be its first martyr.
Best I can do, sorry.
Big topic. Speaking of the steady decline of the dollar, I continue to marvel that they were able to sell 2% annual inflation as normal and even desirable. In an honest, healthy system, 0% would be the target.
The population explosion of the Global South was a direct result of the globalized USD trading system. Just today I saw an article about Zimbabwe’s new gold backed currency failing, but what struck me about it was a picture of a young Zimbabwean boy going to a food aid station. I’m sure that food aid didn’t come from inside Zimbabwe. I am not predicting the future, just taking in the possible implications.
Rhodesia literally was called the “Breadbasket of Africa.” Then something happened.
To put a finer point on it, the only agriculturally self sufficient country in Sub Saharan Africa is South Africa, thanks to the Boer continuing to do his thing. Every single other one relies on food imports, mostly from outside of Africa. SA no longer produces enough to export a whole lot. And although I lack data to support this assertion, I believe that very few of them are paying for very much of their food imports with their own money. I consider the implications of this in the context of a collapsing global USD economic order.
China and Russia are pushing the US out of the way to pick up the tab, too.
Farmers don’t have to live around them at least.
Makes sense.
Still. SA will not last much longer. They will kill and loot the rest when the dam breaks.
People are such summer children.
The new dark age approaches.
Actually nvm. Probably just global nuclear extinction.
Best case… Idiocracy.
According to this report, four African countries account for most of the food imports, many others are net exporters:
Unpacking the misconceptions about Africa’s food imports
Climate change? /s
This post is yet another excellent exposition of the core problem. We have the diagnosis, now what is the remedy? Can voting harder save us? Can a messiah save us? Can a magic incantation rouse the masses into what (protest marches, riots, civil unrest, revolution)? The Soviet Union died a lingering death in 1991 and a new Russia was born from the ashes a decade later. A well-orchestrated purge can accomplish same in a much shorter time frame.
Oh my. It does appear I am now being moderated and my comment is awaiting approval.
Is it something I said? :O)
Yes, spot-on there. As I mentioned in a recent thread, the dollar in my adopted country — my birth-nation having betrayed me and criminalized me — has been constantly de-valued during the past three years or so.
This, simply, is because the (relatively) small banks and economy in this lat-am nation recognize that America no longer is a serious country, and what’s more, is intentionally destroying its own culture and economy in order to ‘Build Back Better’ which, of course, ain’t a-gonna happen. Nobody else wishes to ride-along with America’s national suicide.
Modern Western-based banking and the checking system originated with the Templars and their Crown agency, the East India Company. A piracy scheme of occult practitioners. Essentially, the Templars and their modern descendants of the East Coast Cryptocracy (of which Washington is a part) deliberately are ceding global control and subverting their own nation and people. Culturally, this is most clearly visioned by the replacement of men and masculine culture by women and feminist culture.
Men are the principle of order, women the principle of chaos, and so a feminist culture yields. . . well, what you witness taking place all around you. The two sexes are the fundamental dichotomy on a planet based on dualism (day and night, heaven and earth, hot and cold, light and dark, black and white etc.)
The nation has lost its way, and jettisoned God, in the most basic and fundamental way possible and, in a sense, no longer wants to live and is destroying itself from the inside out. Other nations, looking on, DO want to live and so out of self-preservation are abandoning Her Majesty’s ship, now its gone daft. Cheers.
Weird claim: a planet based in dualism (day and night…)
Night is what we call being in the shadow of our own planet. It’s the umbra cast in the Sun’s light which concerns us, not a shadow cast by Moon light, which is really just reflected sunlight. Now how could this wanderer be based in part on a shadow?? That makes no sense at all.
According to Scribbling, the Sun and other stars were made on the fourth day, which means that there was no night before that moment on the fourth day. A problem for your god’s credibility, however, is that Scribbling testifies that the god(s) made night and day three days before the Sun was made. It insists that the shadow called night was cast before there was any Sun.
That amusing absurdity is just one of many reasons for people to evict Bereshit’s alien, omnimalevolent god(s) from their lives. They have been right to dismiss it (or them) as mythical. Context indicates that a literal interpretation of Ber. 1 was intended, but reality is what doesn’t go away when you accept a creationist myth as fact. The myth could have been sustained by sword and fire, but your faction lost the power to use those methods. Let that myth go.
Maybe however there’s a way for you to salvage something of Israel’s god(s) from the landfill of history before the nations of western Evrope perish. Just read Bereshit unliterally, say, as allegory. There’s no reason to assume that a completely different meaning was not intended in addition to the clownishly erroneous—but intended—literal meaning.
Perhaps Bereshit 1 is supposed to be firstly a cryptic story told by Canaanite ringleaders about how they established their nation, or a faction of a nation, or how they like to imagine that they organized theirselves. But then Bereshit is not very much about western Evropean people, now is it? At any rate, trinitarian versions are almost worthless for this purpose, correct unliteral interpretation. So you’ll need to obtain a better translation…or to learn how to read some Hebrew with a critical eye and imaginative thinking.
It still gets DARK at night though, doesn’t it Mr. Knowitall?
P.S. Go buy a Bible, genius. Bere-shit ain’t in it.
Ok, it still gets dark. So what? Do we have day and night if and only if Bereshit is true? Well, no.
I am correct. You are not. Change your mind.
Oh, and Bereshit is Hebrew. It’s the first word of the first verse of the first chapter of a book which you don’t understand. First word. You can look it up yourself on-line. There’s no need to buy another Bible.
“it means dollars and instruments denominated in dollars, like debt, will lose value on the global market.”
Relative to what? Relative to gold and hard assets, maybe. Relative to other currencies, this is unlikely. I don’t have enough space here for an essay on the multi-trillion Eurodollar system. Suffice it to say that all these BRICS countries have debt denominated in dollars, reserves denominated in dollars, currencies which are either pegged to the dollar (China), or are so volatile (Brazil) or in a state of constant depreciation versus the dollar (India) that they are unsuitable for central-bank reserves. Our country will probably collapse before the dollar does.
Our country will probably collapse before the dollar does
Indeed. The dollar is the most stable component of the flailing United States. Can a fiat currency outlast its issuer?
“Relative to what? Relative to gold and hard assets, maybe. Relative to other currencies, this is unlikely.”
Yep. Also relative to commodities, goods, services, really everything that isn’t imaginary, like fiat currencies. And America may well be able to flog the other fiats, at least for a while, unless maybe BRICS sets up its clearing house properly. Think the last bit of “Trading Places.” If BRICS sets the rules that every country settles accounts at the end of the day, on pain of loss of clearing privileges, suddenly that puts US hegemony in a completely different light. That rule makes BRICS basically expense-free, and able to get by on only a small skim on every transaction. Participating in SWIFT would be cost-prohibitive for most countries.
This would mean US needs to boost exports YESTERDAY. IAs and blue-haired fat chicks and soy boys currently get handouts that raise the money supply. That’s exactly the opposite of what US would need to compete on the world market. All those suddenly become the liabilities that everyone knows they are, and finally that’s how they show up on the balance sheet.
US could continue to import, but only to the extent they (we) are willing to pay the extra to participate in a gray-ish market. But dead weight is dead weight. The Fed would have to deflate, and FedGov would be forced to “liquidate” its liabilities, i.e., non-producers. Sure, they will start with white retirees, but that’s not going to be nearly enough.
This is unintentionally hilarious:
Israel and the BRICS: A tightrope to walk | Allia Bukhari | The Blogs
Excerpt:
Most of the current BRICS members do not share the same loyalties to Israel the way many Western countries do, and it allows them to embrace a harsher stance concerning Israel’s actions. Despite a divided Global South, post-colonial grievances with the western world unite these countries in seeing Israel through a critical lens. The BRICS is also emerging as a counterbalance to the “pro-Zionist stance” of the West and its expansion does affect Israel in its efforts to normalize ties with nations in this part of the world. The challenge for the current members of the BRICS would be maintaining their individual economic and commercial ties with Israel, condemning Hamas while simultaneously navigating their role as the anti-colonial voice of the Global South.
Challenge??? The lack of self-awareness is off the charts, but we knew that.
The Issys have certainly burned their bridges with Russia. Mossad in Ukraine looked like it was the last straw for Putin.
In WWII the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to start the war in the Pacific because we cut off their oil supply. They surmised they had no other option. The West will start a major war to try and prevent all of this.
A war our depleted and too-PC military can’t win. We have barely 150 (187 if you count the non-combat coded jets) F-22s, while the Chinese are turning out hundreds of their equivalent jets.
The F-35 is a world-beating jet, but it is expensive and is too dependent on vulnerable tankers and runways.
We’ve fallen behind on UAVs. The ChiComs are putting hulls in the water and our corrupt military industrial complex is just a vast grifting scheme.
We are still building littoral combat ships that are supposed to be modular warships able to do tasks with “mission modules,” but we don’t have enough of the modules because of technical issues and these ships are useless empty hulls without them.
Unlike WWII, we don’t have the manufacturing and with modern weapons being ridiculously complex, we couldn’t build them fast enough even if we still had the workforce we did in the 1940s. It takes months, even at double shifts, to build an F-35 for example. Same with our now-aging M1 tanks. It takes years to build a warship or heck, even a vital replenishment ship.
Years of neglect and “fighting a war of terror” on the Muslims have made our military unable to fight against a “peer” adversary. Our procurement system is so broken that the Pentagon can’t decide what it wants and changes its collective mind far too often.
Kind of says it all right there
Well, a white pill enrobing a black pill.
That’s a white pill as big as an Alka-Seltzer.
The United States also seized Japan’s assets that were within reach and interfered with its use of TELEX services that were used to conduct trade prior to SWIFT. None of this is new except there are other big guys in the picture now.
Splitting the world into two competing trade blocs will not be easy but I predict things will turn out for the best. The two sides will settle down peacefully to trade exclusively within their own trade blocs. Europe will accept its status as the New Africa of the world, a land of rising hope and opportunity. Our own new American citizens will inject a jolt of energy we have recently been sorely lacking in our economy. GDP will skyrocket from the diversity dividend. Women make the better decision-makers overall so the West has the edge there as well especially with steering ships into rocks.
When they aren’t busy flying Navy jets into mountain peaks. Or on the abortion table. Because progress ^tm.
Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome strikes again.
Or the female deck officer allowing a destroyer to collide with a container ship because she was in a bit of a tiff with the female officer in the CIC and the two were not speaking.
That’s what I call progress.
Now that it’s ragging on women in the navy day, the story whose dire implications still seem underappreciated is the one where the senior enlisted (female) on the ship had the secret internet connection antenna set up and lied to superiors about it for a good long while. But the worst part was she had the complicity and participation of the entire chief’s mess, male and female. The chief’s mess is supposed to be the backbone of the ship, the enforcer of order and discipline. Her punishment was demotion from E8 to E7 and there was almost no punishment for the rest of them. What does this tell you about discipline in the ranks of the USN?
Quick answer: There ain’t none. I know from my time with the Air Force Reserve and National Guard that discipline in the ranks isn’t what it once was. A lot of it is the soft generation we have now, but a lot of it comes from on high. The days of reaming people new assholes for stupidity are over.
What it tells me is access to the interwebs is more important to sailors than duty or honor. The gals are one problem. Diversity is another. Chinese sailor-spies? Iranian Pentagon-spies. Its a good thing the Russians are white, or the DOD would be pushing their spies onto the ships, too.
And lets not forget the proud maritime traditions of the Africans and Aztecs. If we just keep saying in hard enough it will come true: Diversity is our Strength!
Endless empowerment, zero accountability.
In the old Brit Empire, they hung an admiral merely for not pursuing an enemy ship with sufficient vigor. Losing your ship meant a rigorous inquiry and your career (and perhaps life) was kaput.
Not exactly the standard in the new woke/feminist military. I doubt that the new military could win a war with Honduras.
With a capital ‘P’.
Ha, this is satire right?
Satire violates the terms of service and may earn you a fine or even jail.
This, fellow citizen, is a celebration.
This one gets three “hehs.” One of the more amusing posts I’ve read on this site.
I do enjoy satire.
This is generally correct. However, there is one limitation with BRICS. None of the major countries that comprise it have a fully convertible currency. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese are willing to take this last step to make their currency fully convertible. I think this hesitancy is due to politics. This is why the Dollar will still remain the top currency used in trade. But its usage will decline over time. Currently 90% of world trade is in Dollars. This could decline to, say, 60% over the next 10 years if BRICS is successful.
The lack of a fully convertible currency is why BRICS is talking about creating international finance institutions that would create SDR’s and other work-a rounds that would allow for trade without a fully convertible currency. This is similar to the old Breton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. I do wish them the best of luck. The bullying that our political class has inflicted on the rest of the world, particularly post 2001, is unacceptable to any self-respecting individual or nation. It is perfectly understandable that much of the world will seek other options for international trade.
Very good points. But call me when the first multi-billion BRICS SDR-denominated bond financing occurs. We may not live to see it.
Also throw into the fact that the American-led financial empire is, at least traditionally, a fairly united bloc of like-minded white people. Yes yes, we have our interlopers and wannabes who try and plug into the Euro-American system, but the system and the rules are a product of the native peoples of the Anglosphere and of northern Europe. Yes yes, the rules have been subverted by bad actors and a certain avaricious ethny, but I would assert that your average white Iowan has more in common culturally and morally with a German or a Frenchman or an Ashkenazi than an average Russian has with a Chinese or an Arab or an Indian.
I predict BRICS squabbles coming out of the new arrangement. It will not be unlike how the Greeks tried to make right with the German banks, and just couldn’t. At some point, the Arabs will get pissed off with, say, Chinese capriciousness and we’ll see semi-triumphant articles in The Economist.
“I predict BRICS squabbles “. You are probably right, but have faith in our elite’s ability to continue to piss them off bad enough that they will overlook their differences and make it work.
BRICS:
Yeah, good luck with that.
Bingo. Until the BRICS can figure out a reserve asset – besides T-bills – they won’t get far.
A Chinese businessman who sells $10 million worth of electronics to an Indian company will get a bunch of rupees that he doesn’t need. What does he do with them? He doesn’t want Indian bonds or other assets. By far, the best option is T-bills, so he converts the rupees to dollars and buys T-bills.
It’s not just about the dollar as the GRC. It’s about T-bills as the global reserve asset.
Gold will be the reserve asset for BRICS, not Xibux.
Gold would seem the logical answer. The businessman could convert their rupees or yuan or whatever into gold, which would be stored at the central bank. The physical gold would exist, but the buying and selling would be digital.
Gold is more volatile than t-bills, but it’s safe and likely won’t lose money after inflation like t-bills likely will in the future.
Buffett is still putting his faith in t bills, at least for now. I’m taking a cue from that
What would China or India need to do to attain a “fully convertible currency?”
A govt bond market. You need to store your currency in something that isn’t volatile, holds its value and is liquid. Short-term govt bonds are the natural choice, but China doesn’t have a govt bond market open to the int’l investors.
Mexico and other states may continue to use the U.S. dollar for trading purposes, but with the world’s biggest economies and their energy suppliers scrambling for alternatives it may not be enough to provide the float required to finance America’s out-of-control appetite for debt.
Convertibility is not necessary. All that is necessary for a clearing house is a sufficient number of transactions in the various currencies. At the end of the day (or whatever clearing time period) all transactions in RMB are netted out, all Euros are netted out, etc. Only whatever is left over needs to be converted, and not even then. For the most part, the clearing house has the assets to let that difference ride overnight and pocket the interest. Which, in a world based on “real” growth rather than financial paper, means reasonable vig, as @Zman explains in his essay.
Thinking on it a bit, there is a real opportunity for both sides to rapid reporting of these currency imbalances. If there are excess pounds in the system, it will be to England’s advantage not to lose value, so a Brazilian businessman and an English businessman might come to a deal that washes England’s books. For a price, obviously.
And, of course, the losers are those who don’t produce a damn thing but depravity. Which might be the only way out away from those people for America.
All I can say is GOOD. It’s too bad that the American people are going to suffer as a result, but anything that can rid us of this nightmare government is a big plus in the end.
I think this is another aspect of The Great Replacement. The imported helot/voting-machines get paid in dollars and send them back out to the country of origin. This keeps dollars sloshing around. Those who work above ground are taxed on payday – feeding the empire’s coffers. Then, they all pay large fees sending the money overseas and the banks gorge themselves on the fees. Then their family and folk spend the money back home on consumer goods branded by the empire’s merchant corps. Then those governments tax that and keep their loans to the empire’s real rulers – the banks, paid up.
How do we know? The man in charge of The Great Replacement’s Finish The Job phase said so himself. It is a system of usury so vast it beggars belief.
Brace yourself. One of the consequences of this is the numbers of aliens they are going to bring in will make the last 3.5 years seem like a trickle. Emporer Caracalla dissolved the Roman people when he granted everyone in the empire citizenship overnight.
The GAE is effectively dissolving citizenship not around the Mediterranean basin when most couldn’t travel. It is doing it around the entire globe and handing people plane, boat and train tickets to come in and prop the empire up.
This time the aliens are not the same Germanic/Aryan stock occupying the ranks and flooding the borders to essentially act as a great renewal of the people who once made Rome and Greece. No. It is a dissolution whose only source of perpetuation and replenishment is you and whoever has the will to stay strong and survive this Kali Yuga.
The GAE is the most evil and corrupt entity the world has ever known. That means whoever runs it are the most evil and corrupt the world has ever known. The bloodthirst, insularity, perfidy of the most powerful of them is on display at the center of the global stage. We aren’t going to have time to worry about. Get ready for the tidalwave and dig in to survive. Were it just an economic calamity we would weather this no problem. Sadly, that is the least of our problems that The Regime is creating for us.
It will be interesting to see if Washington attempts to sabotage the BRICs somehow. Perhaps they’ll start experiencing an unknown series of computer glitches in the months to come. The NSA — the Puzzle Palace — probably has access to some pretty good hackers, if not in-house then in the nether reaches of American society.
A computer Lord may find himself with a pretty good deal: wreck this platform and we’ll drop the charges against you. If that oil pipeline in Europe was sabotaged by America, I wouldn’t put it past them to do the same but only to computers.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
You don’t remember the Hong Kong protests in 2019? We are always and everywhere sticking our nose where it doesn’t belong. Why do you think Putin is very aggressive against the LGBTQ shit? He knows they use that crap as a way to create wedges and force themselves in where they aren’t wanted. Read up on color revolutions, we had one here in 2020.
The PRC media helpfully published photos of local protest leaders meeting in a hotel coffee shop with accredited NED people based in the US Consulate in Hong Kong. The then Twittersphere following the protests was full of journalists, NGO types, and people who had been heavily involved in the Kiev Maidan colour revolution.
There’s no smoke without fire and the youngsters who participated (instigators were a different kettle of fish) in those protests had legitimate real grievances which are not relevant to the meta discussion. What’s truly disgusting is the callous way in which they were set up to fail and lives blighted just so that the GAE could ‘score points’ against the PRC.
That being said, if you added up the prison sentences and time served to date, there’d be fewer Hong Kong Protest man-years in the hoosegow here than there have been for Jan 6. Also there’s no Negro Ass Rape in Hong Kong prisons.
This is the end of the Global American Empire. The dollar and the banking system was the ultimate power, the idiots in charge overused this weapon and now it’s being taken away from them.
With our ridiculous, never to be repaid national debt, we are hosed. The inflation now will be seen as salad days in a decade if things continue.
It could always get worse.
Our idiots in charge may decide to go nuclear if they ever realize how they frittered away the power of the USD for nothing.
I worry about that. I also worry about the world that my five children will inherit even if the ICBMs aren’t flying. The people in charge have frittered away decades of the Pax Americana as if they meant to destroy it, which might be the case.
Of course they mean to destroy it (and us). They’ve been openly preaching that for years. Build Back Better, DEI, open borders. What is this but self-destruction, suicide?
“The steady decline of the dollar means a steady decline in the American standard of living, barring a revolution in Washington.”
It’s inevitable, period. With or without revolution. The tides of history and all that. It was good while it lasted but all good things come to an end. North America and western Europe are going to see — correction, are already seeing — irreversible declines in the standard of living. I expect the decline to pick up momentum over the years.
Silver lining – hopefully the decline in standard of living will cause all the goat fuckers, street shitters, and other savages to repatriate.
Many like to think so, but I doubt it. For reference see the tweet I added a link to yesterday. And Sailer, civnat to his core, even had a post about Indian Suketu Meta’s book “This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto.” All those born here travel back and forth constantly to visit family, and have never known a White America (just like Whites under 30). They will stay and AINO will continue to become indistinguishable from the rest of the sh*tty non-White world. Only thing left is try to build your progeny a solid financial and White social ark – nothing else worth working towards.
I suspect the replacement population was selected precisely due to its familiarity with poverty and its low financial expectations.
Once they see a Walmart, they ain’t ever going back.
How you gonna keep Chittrapondee down on the rice paddy once he’s seen the Golden Corral buffet?
“They will stay”
They’ll look for other options, if they’re there. It will be a rational calculation. In the case of white Americans, what frequently holds them back from emigrating is friends and family here, long familiarity with the country, no fluency in any other language, and having been brainwashed into reflexively thinking it’s a dangerous world out there.
Arshad Ali: I would argue it’s more complex and more fundamental than that. Most White Americans have given little thought to what, exactly, makes them different (assuming that they are) from their immigrant ancestors. That’s one of the first issues I confronted when I lived overseas: Am I different? What makes me American? Does it matter? Does it matter to me if my kids are American? Why?
There are a number of beautiful and civilized countries in Europe, but merely being born there – or even learning the language – does not make one Hungarian or Austrian. There is no magic dirt anywhere. But the old America – because of abundant land and resources, what used to be the sheer distance from “the homeland,” and the intermingling of various White, Christian ethnicities, did create a new sort of mindset and lifestyle.
The distance, and the generations required, and the confidence of the founding population – all that is gone now. I don’t ‘fear’ the world out there – but I’ve learned what means ‘home’ for me. We were blessed to spend time in Vienna and London, but the wooded ridges of the Ozarks and the generally solid and hardworking White heritage Americans is where we’ve chosen.
“The distance, and the generations required,…”
Well, if you’ve a culture that is ethnocentric and tends toward not mixing outside one’s “people”, e.g., Hasidic, or Romanian, or Amish—then never. Indians might be different as they go back for family and marriage. In short, they keep repopulating/reimporting.
However for more normal races, 3-4 generations will do the trick. That’s long enough for the last living memory “of the old country” to die off. Worked for me. None of my children have ever been to the “old country”. Might as well tell them stories about “Middle Earth” and their Hobbit ancestors. They are American—whatever that means today.
Compsci: As long as they are White and of Christian heritage, I’d say 4 generations at least – until they’ve never known a living ancestor who either came from the ‘old country’ or who remembered his/her parent who was born there. Make it a more ethnocentric group that tends to only marry within its ethnicity – like the Greeks – and it takes much longer. Again, ‘assimilation’ – to the very limited extent it even exists – is a two-way street.
My cat gave birth in a neighbors stable recently. She did not have foals.
The goat lovers wont be able to repatriate if those promised lands are occupied by your Greatest Ally and their golem.
Maybe Trump, Musk etc. will staple some green cards for them?
It will. But also white people with means and skills will be emigrating as well. In fact are emigrating. The grass really is greener on the other side. Just as the great-great-grandparents of today’s white Americans moved from Europe to North America because they were literally starving (Ireland, Germany, Norway) so also will today’s white Americans seek to leave the USA. There’s an interesting essay by the late Prof. Wallerstein written eight years back:
https://iwallerstein.com/the-increasingly-unstable-united-states/
Patriotism is there when times are good. Otherwise people start looking for exit options.
That strikes me as a very shallow view of what makes a people and a nation. It’s why most people of any normal nation (except for current-day murkans brainwashed with the ‘nation of immigrants’ bullshite) look askance at the immigrant – especially one of a different racial and religious heritage. Your interpretation is just a variation on rootless cosmopolitanism.
“That strikes me as a very shallow view of what makes a people and a nation.”
But your European ancestors must surely have felt the same way about the European country they were leaving, no? Blood and soil. But when times were sufficiently bad they made the move. Why do you think Americans won’t leave when confronted with similar choices — i.e., an increasingly tough life in the USA versus greener pastures abroad?
I think you and 3g are both right. 3g is correct that there is a certain blood-and-soil rootedness in most people which makes them loath to pull up stakes except under the most dire of pressures. You are also right that the vast majority of people have their price. If it’s a choice between starving to death in the fields outside of Blytheville, Arkansas or leading a middle-class existence in Bologna, Italy, very few people are going to leave their bones in Arkansas.
Ostei: Yes – most people do have their price, and starving is one of them. There also needs to be a realistic alternative. For now, most White people don’t have one. Unless you want to take the time and trouble to trace and prove and document ancestry, most European countries will not accept American Whites as citizens without a substantial amount of money. My husband qualifies under both Italian and Irish laws but we decided the same problems apply there as here.
I wonder what the restrictions are like for immigration to Slavic lands. I’m sure they vary from country to country.
There are any number of videos on countries to obtain a foreign passport from (Take that grammar Nazi’s!). Can’t remember any from what we call the “West”. What I do note however, is that in most cases—if not all—these countries did *not* give you voting rights, many no working rights, nor welfare, but only an residency right and perhaps protection under the law as provided their natural born citizens. Non-voting rights seemed a particularly astute move. If only we were that smart.
Russia has recently started encouraging dissidents from the West to consider immigration there. The have more land than they know what to do with and have looked at some guest worker programs from countries like Vietnam. Putin Knows how Gastarbiters worked out in Germany.
As for me and mine, we have to stay here and fight if that’s necessary. My ancestors came here mostly from the British Isles 10 or more generations ago. There’s no going back to any “mother country” for us.
As a first approximation, standards here would have to deteriorate to being worse than where most of the invaders came from. That’s a pretty bad drop. Unless, perhaps, there was a political sea change and the recent arrivals were “encouraged” by various active measures to exit posthaste.
Europe is in bad shape, they have no oil, not really much of anything. I think a lot of the Green BS comes from Europe. I think the Democrats are the Europeans franchise store in the US.
As my European colleagues say frequently in private, “America is too important to allow Americans to make its decisions.” I represent a European country. This view is commonly held throughout its trade ministry. The world tends to view the American PEOPLE as an afterthought. If.
glad you guys haven’t lost your aristocratic attitude 😉
I am a single passport American. I renounce Talmud and curse the jewish goblins. I have attitude but hail in part from Liechtensteini/Swiss-German farmers who were Amish then Mennonite. Not aristocratic whatsoever.
It all has to do with electronics and miniaturization. Back in the old mechanical days, actually took some talent and know-how to build, let’s say, an NCR cash register. It was not easy and not everybody could do it. Those things were mechanical and heavy and in their own way, a marvel of engineering. Now with electronics, they are practically a throwaway item. Anybody can build one anywhere in the world. Unless we can figure out something else nobody else can replicate, I think we become the new England and France. It was a nice run though.
This will be Biden’s lasting legacy. Weaponizing the dollar and letting neo-cons use it against the world was a terrible mistake.
Stolen elections have consequences, especially when they install lunatic ideologues who are largely detached from reality.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap…
A whole lot of them should reap a noose.
As a person of color, I find your use of the word “noose” problematic.
In non-partisan fairness, the same argument can be made if all elections were conducted honestly. The problem with democracies, as wiser men than me have noted, is that they tend to decline once citizens learn they can vote themselves benefits from the public purse and/or spend now and forward the IOU to future generations to — maybe — make good when the creditor comes calling. Nobody ever asks whether the future will be willing, or indeed even able, to pay that debt.
Alas, extensive history shows that just because the majority believes something doesn’t make it a wise choice or even true.
“Money printer go brrrrr” and weaponized sanctions started well before Biden.
The whole world is sick of it.
I remember a talk given by a former Air Force colonel discussing sanctions. Essentially: “They don’t work quickly, but are designed to destroy your country over generations.”
Cuba an excellent example of this. The Cold War ended a long, long time ago. We’re still punishing Cuba.
I would place the start of it with Bush. They sanctioned a group of banks that had been doing business with North Korea. The point was to cut off the NORKS from the global financial system and starve them of hard currency. It almost worked as they were just recovering from the famine. From that point the use of the dollar as a weapon went out of control.
Dollar diplomacy has always been part of the toolkit, but never to the point where the world saw it as a weapon and certainly not as part of a regime change program. There is the real root cause. This idea that the neocons can select your government is the true evil.
I’m sure that sanctioning North Korea looked great on paper.
The real-world problem with doing that is the reality that NK has two powerful backing nations – China and Russia.
Both of those countries do not have an issue trading with NK. They are happy to do it directly or help the Norks set up all manner of cut-outs/fronts/shell companies, etc.
Again, this is what happens when there is a ruling class of bubble people that do not interface with actual reality.
I wonder what will happen when the decades-long blackout on available information, goods and services is beheld by the North Korean soldiers being transferred to fight against Ukraine. Will their heads explode?
I have no doubt they will rend their clothing and gnash their teeth at missing out on drag Queen story hour.
Looks like you are at the wrong rally Red.
That would certainly make my head splode…
RO-
You are not wrong to point out the reality that a great deal of North Korea’s austerity is self-imposed by the ruling family.
Somebody thought that with
*the North Korean money laundering (Macau casinos),
*drug trade (‘ran-ran’, methamphetamines),
*black labs (genetic engineering),
*nuclear weapons development (plutonium enrichment, missiles), and
*continuous full-volume propaganda (no off switchs or volume knobs on DMZ loudspeaker radios blasting 24/7),
they would discover the ancient symbol of Juche was a six-pointed star, with a forgotten homeland in the Ukraine.
The North Koreans are the Chosun People, after all.
Their heads won’t explode, because they’ll never see such. Yeah, there will be “some” differences between the economics experienced, but the NK soldiers will be kept separate from the Uke’s and Russians for the most part. They’ll be no weekend passes to Moscow.
Yep. A lot of damage in general started with Dubya. Obama was supposed to stop and reverse some of this. But he was both too weak and corrupt to do so.
You can find graphs and charts that show the steady decline of the American share of global world trade. Most of this is due to the economic rise of China. Unlike our idiots who considered manufacturing, and particularly tech manufacturing, to be a “back room” low value added activity, the Chinese have always considered the primary industries, particularly manufacturing, to be the basis of an economy. Americans started consuming stupid pills starting around 1995 or so.
In the 90s there were actual debates on free trade, and everyone remembers Perot and the “giant sucking sound.” Not everyone was stupid then, but the international money men got their way and here we are.
If only. America started downing those pills with massive slugs of cheap rum along about 1965. Now granted, the economic stupid pills are of more recent vintage.
Zman, we put Iran under sanctions as soon as they kicked out the CIA backed Sha. That was probably the first very publicized instance. When people won’t follow you due to your virtue, well ya gotta use fraud, and when that fails, force!
Oh, you can go back a lot further. In 1941, the United States placed Japan under an oil embargo, seized its assets, and more or less did what was then the equivalent of kicking it off what became SWIFT (basically cutting most access to rudimentary TELEX). It did not end well.
Yup. PS please consider approving my comment. It’s hard enough talking into a howling void. I can certainly leave if you wish.
Actually, I’d settle for knowing exactly how and why some postings are held for approval while most are not. There’s an algorithm behind it I’m certain.
Oh. I didn’t realize it was a general problem. Thanks for letting me know.
I did get 4 downvotes for asking for the post to be approved. I mean, huh??
Ah yes, that also reminds me of a kind old Yenta bragging about the death of, say half a million Iraqi children…
I thought she was English?
I place it at Cromwell letting the you know what’s back into England.
Dollar diplomacy has always been part of the toolkit, but nobody’s afraid of it anymore now that we don’t manufacture anything and we’re $35 trillion in debt.
Sanctions go back even further than that. Remember what we did to Iran after they kicked their Western installed thug out?
Yeah there was a significant faction of the dissident right that was gidddy at all the COVID money-printing in Trumps last year.
Richard Spencer, Keith Woods, and Hunter Wallace I remember in particular.
Now Hunter Wallace has spent the last 4 years crying like a baby over inflation.
How I absolutely detest right wingers who use the term “Bidenflation”
Trumpbucks were a great lesson. Those envelopes with his signature in them were the nearest any normal person ever got to being the first spender of inflated currency, benefiting from inflation as bankers et al do.
Of course that’s not quite what happened. The system works, and benefiting the citizenry isn’t part of it. The numbers were negligible except symbolically—and except to non-welfare broke guys, all of whose lives were briefly materially improved by the government for the first and only time (unless they stupidly “saved” the money).
What we learned was who’s who(m). Who gets really fucking angry at the thought of the designated losers of our financial system ever getting anything? Every libertarian, almost every Republican, and every Democrat who understands that their party’s power is in deciding who gets paid, not in broad gestural magnanimity toward the citizenry—which they now (again) call fascism.
If “the right” were right about the negative social/moral/etc. effects of Trumbucks style no-strings cash payments, Democrats would favor them. They do not. They pay specific people to do specific things—to be a specific injury to others.
Mitch McConnell, the man who has helped send half a trillion to “Ukraine” via his generous friends at NGO’s and the MIC, referred to the Trumpbucks as “welfare for the wealthy.” You couldn’t make that up.
It’s just too stupid.
No wonder congress has an 8% approval rating.
8% on the bell curve is about 80 IQ btw.
We do not live in a real country.
…yet 99% (+/-) of congress critters are re-elected.
The printed money going to the peasants instead of the nobility?
Bah!
Humbug!
Anyway, do some basic math. $2,300 per person is 690 Billion. They printed over 6 TRILLION. Those last few zeros are important.
The plebs only got a small taste of the coin clipping.
Yes. Although Tater Joe Biden is not making any of these decisions whatsoever. Tater Joe is just a front-man … the carnival barker outside the tent. He doesn’t own the circus and he certainly doesn’t decide upon carnival policy.
Plato and Aristotle wrote on this topic 2400 years ago. Politicians are interchangeable and replaceable foci for short-term alleviation of popular discontent. Democracy has always been a tool of oligarchy, including importation of diversity.
“Tyrants favour immigration from distant cultures in order to dilute the strength of the moral standards against which their actions will be judged.” — Aristotle 384-322 BC.
Of course, back then it was Greeks importing other Greeks from a different tribe, rather than Africans and Muslims. Tater Joe is a front-man for the worst of the two Jewish factions who compete to rule over us. They didn’t invent any of these techniques, they just amplified existing patterns into more civilizationally terminal outcomes. The goal of the Greek tyrant was simply to maintain power and wealth. The goal of the alien tyrants who currently rule over us is our extinction and replacement.
‘Nothing new under the sun’ wins again.
It’s not Biden. Biden is only the latest in a long line of people abusing the privilege.
It’s like the people blaming Biden for the inflation believe all of our problems started on Jan 2021. Everyone was cheering the money printing before Biden. Everyone cheered the free money covid checks. The free money covid SBA checks. The rent-free housing. The big fat UE checks during covid. The zero interest rates. QE as far back as 08 and 09.
I am certainly no fan of Biden. I did not vote for him and I would not vote for Kumala. The theft of all the Russian money and the ridiculous sanction regime were terrible policy. But it wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last.
yeah and are either of them talking about fiscal sanity this cycle? crickets
Biden was late to the game. Neocon Central. the WaPo reckons the sanctions wars started in 1960.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/us-sanction-countries-work/
This happened because the US & West “elites” were bloodsucking the system. The final straw was Biden with his openly taking bribes and kickbacks using Ukraine as the vehicle.
And then putting sanctions on Russia because they have some kind of hate fetish for Russia. We visited Moscow & St Petersburg in the early 2010’s. I commented to my wife, “There is no reason anymore for us to not be friends with Russia.”
Anybody with a lick of sense would have seen that since the 1st sanction didn’t work, that we should not have been piling one more and more sanctions. What are we up to now, the 20th sanction?
This may be the most important reason for Trump’s election. Harris and her handlers will do everything wrong correcting this if they are inclined to do anything at all. But hey, abortion and all that.