This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author
World War III has already begun. You simply aren’t being told this because your government and dishonest media outlets are dedicated to keeping you in the dark. After all, they want to use the remaining time to stockpile food, ammunition, medical supplies, and precious metals for themselves, and this can only be accomplished by withholding the truth about the situation for as long as possible.
The Prime Minister of Serbia may be an exception to this, as he is now publicly warning that the world is about to experience a “great world conflict” that will likely begin in the next two months.
“Aleksandar Vucic made the alarming comments during the first day of the UN General Assembly session in New York,” reports Paul Joseph Watson at Summit.news. The full quote from Vucic is:
I assume that we’re leaving the phase of the special military operation and approaching a major armed conflict, and now the question becomes where is the line, and whether after a certain time – maybe a month or two, even – we will enter a great world conflict not seen since the Second World War.
NATO is already at war with Russia, and Putin is gearing up for a continental battle
What’s happening is that psychopathic western nations — the real aggressors in this war — have unleashed not just “suicide sanctions” against Russia, but are also running Ukraine’s military operations against Russia. This means NATO is already in the war, even if NATO won’t admit it yet. Worse yet, NATO leaders are openly demanding the complete destruction of Russia and the occupation/exploitation of Russia’s natural resources, which is of course the entire model of global exploitation and pillaging typically carried out by the west. (Disrupt, pillage, control. That’s the CIA model that has been unleashed against other nations for decades…)
Conditions are already long past the point of negotiation or de-escalation between Russia and the west. The psychopathic leaders of the west (Victoria Nuland comes to mind) are Russo-phobic Russia haters who are determined to carry out genocide against the Russian people, even if it means destroying their own economies and agricultural supply chains in the process. These psychopaths, Putin has come to realize, can’t be reasoned with or trusted to abide by any agreements whatsoever. Russia realizes it must fight or die. That’s where we are right now.
Unfortunately, the insanity of western nations has escalated this conflict to a condition where whoever launches nukes first has the advantage. This is a very dangerous dynamic, obviously, and it stems from the fact that the west has repeatedly signaled it will not allow the existence of Russia in its “New World Order” vision of planet Earth. With friends like Victoria Nuland calling the shots, who needs enemies?
Russia has a 30+ year advantage over the west in terms of nuclear weapons and anti-air defenses
An important realization in all this is that NATO’s nuclear arsenal is ancient — mostly running on designs originally engineered in the 1970s — while Russia’s nuclear capabilities are at least two generations ahead, modernized with hyperglide reentry vehicles, evasive maneuver capabilities for ICBMs, hypersonic cruise missiles which are nuclear-capable, and highly advanced anti-air defense systems that can even intercept and take down incoming ICBMs. In addition, Russia possesses secret “doomsday” weapons — far beyond their thermobaric bombs — that the world hasn’t even seen yet. On the current trajectory, those weapons are going to be introduced to the west without any warning whatsoever, resulting in the complete annihilation of Western European governments, currencies, and industry.
I have no doubt whatsoever that Russia has already designated the targets of its first strike, and that those targets include London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, US naval fleets, and virtually all military bases across Western Europe. We are now just one launch away from a civilization-ending event.
The USA and NATO have deluded themselves into thinking they can win a nuclear exchange with Russia, but this is just as delusional as thinking “men can get pregnant” or that money printing doesn’t cause inflation (notably, the brain-dead Biden regime insists that both of these absurdities are absolutely true). Over the past two decades — and more recently led by the insanity of wokeism — the west has become fully invested in delusional thinking and fairy tale narratives that have no connection with reality. While the west has been waging a propaganda narrative war, Russia has been engineering the world’s most advanced nuclear weapons. Once the nuclear exchange begins, there’s no question whatsoever about its outcome. Russia will lose a few million people — far less than what they lost in World War II — but they will annihilate Germany, Poland, France, and the United Kingdom. Western Europe will be plunged into a generation of despair and darkness, while the U.S. suffers a cascading financial collapse due to exposure to European banks, currencies, and debt markets.
Western journalists and kleptocrats are incapable of seeing this reality, and they are similarly incapable of acting to stop it. They are caught in their own delusional world of self-inflicted brainwashing and propaganda, believing (somehow) that they can bully Russia into capitulating to the west’s insane demands. But Russia is no Third World nation. Russia can’t be economically dismantled with western sanctions, and Russia has its own domestic supply chain for literally everything it needs to feed its people, build more weapons and earn a fortune in exports of energy and commodities to willing trade partners like India, China, Turkey, and Iran.
Finally, Putin will not back down, and Putin is far more intelligent than any of the cognitively-challenged lunatics running the USA, UK, or NATO countries. In a chess match between Putin and Biden, you’d probably see Joe Biden augmented with remote-controlled vibrating diapers to send him chess move signals through his rectum, and he still wouldn’t understand the meaning of chess notations anyway. The leaders of western nations are so utterly incompetent that they don’t even qualify as “clowns,” since good clowns are actually intelligent, capable communicators who can make people laugh. Biden, Blinken, and Nuland just make us all want to puke.
The West has already grossly miscalculated with “suicide sanctions” but still won’t admit to their catastrophic errors
As proof of the incompetence of western nations, consider the fact that their “suicide sanctions” against Russia — originally implemented to try to force Russia into a currency collapse — has had the opposite effect. The sanctions are destroying the Euro, not the Ruble, and now all of Western Europe faces a winter of darkness, famine, and freezing to death. That’s on top of the “permanent deindustrialization” of European industry that is already well under way, with about 70% of metals smelting and ammonia production already offline. Fertilizer production has ground to a halt, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline has been halted, and to add insult to injury, Belgium is proudly announcing the shutting down of a nuclear power plant, right as Belgium faces an energy scarcity catastrophe.
Germany, meanwhile, is putting another $8 billion into bailing out Uniper, a major natural gas provider, and that’s on top of $15 billion already spent trying to prevent Uniper’s collapse. Germany’s industrial base is being wiped out at astonishing speed, and nobody in the German government is telling the German people they won’t have jobs as industry collapses.
Putin must be astonished at the speed at which Western Europe — and Germany in particular — is destroying itself. Recall that Germany destroyed Western Europe twice already: World War I and World War II. Now, Germany (still largely run by Nazis) is leading the way to the total destruction of Europe yet again. At one level, Putin need not launch any nukes at all… he merely needs to wait for winter to kick in and for the laws of thermodynamics and economics to do the rest.
The greens must be proud: Entire forests are being clear cut for firewood
Yesterday I spoke with war correspondent Michael Yon who had just traveled through Germany (my interview with him will post tomorrow on Brighteon.com). He told me the forests were being clear-cut everywhere across Germany (at least that he could see) in a desperate effort by the people to stockpile firewood for the coming winter. This is the new “green” agenda on parade: Clear-cutting forests that will take decades to grow back. Will the greenies celebrate all the dead forests because at least Germany didn’t burn fossil fuels? Does anybody realize that a 19th-century economy can’t support a 21st-century population? Famine is a mathematical certainty.
To stop this crisis, all Germany has to do is apologize to Russia, drop the economic sanctions and beg Gazprom to turn the gas back on, but no, they won’t dare do that, even if hundreds of thousands of German citizens starve to death and die of exposure. In exactly the same way Adolf Hitler threw starving, freezing German soldiers into Russia’s defensive lines at Stalingrad in 1943, today’s German leaders are sacrificing the lives of their own citizens in a desperate bid to try to economically harm Russia … and it isn’t even accomplishing that! In the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet Union surrounded and defeated Germany’s Sixth Army, which surrendered more than 220,000 soldiers to the Russians. Today, Germany is willing to sacrifice millions of its own citizens if necessary, proving that Nazi-style suicide maneuvers remain alive and well in Berlin, even generations after the catastrophic outcome of World War II.
You can beat the Nazis out of Russia, but you can’t beat the Nazi tendencies out of the German political leaders.
Russia, meanwhile, is sitting on massive quantities of low-cost energy, minerals, steel manufacturing, fertilizer production, successful food crops, electronics manufacturing, and everything else needed to keep civilization on its feet. Yet to this very day, there isn’t one Western European politician who will admit the truth of where things stand. Too bad propaganda can’t heat homes, or the western media would be the ultimate renewable energy source for the entire planet.
The upshot of all this? Anyone living in Western Europe should prepare for an economic collapse, famine, and nuclear war.
Those living in North America should prepare for economic collapse and worldwide nuclear fallout that will disrupt crops for years to come.
Those who don’t store food will end up eating radioactive food if they can find any at all.
“All of a sudden major retailers are feverishly canceling orders, and this would only make sense if a severe economic downturn was imminent,” journalist Micheal Snyder writes.
A common refrain from people who are critical of alternative economists is that we have been predicting crisis for so long that “eventually we will be right.” These are generally people who don’t understand the nature of economic decline – It’s like an avalanche that builds over time, then breaks and quickly escalates as it flows down the mountain.
Walmart, Target, and dozens of other major U.S. retailers are canceling billions of dollars in orders ahead of the coming holiday season, according to reports.
The holiday season is usually the busiest time of year, and at this time in 2021, there were concerns the global supply chain couldn’t handle the demand.
But it’s the opposite in 2022.
“All of a sudden major retailers are feverishly canceling orders, and this would only make sense if a severe economic downturn was imminent,” journalist Micheal Snyder writes.
Walmart admitted that it has canceled “billions of dollars in orders” as the upcoming holiday season approaches.
John David Rainey, Walmart’s EVP and CFO, said it had cleared most summer inventory, was reducing exposure in electronics, home and sporting goods, and canceled “billions of dollars in orders” to realign inventories. He said, “Our actions in Q3 will allow us to make significant progress toward rationalizing absolute levels and mix, which will enable our stores to be well positioned ahead of the holiday season.”
Meanwhile, Target canceled “more than $1.5 billion” in orders.
Christina Hennington, Target’s EVP and chief growth officer, said steps being taken by the discounter’s buying team include “rigorously reforecasting expectations for the balance of the year and beyond and determining where to reduce future receipts and orders.
Kohl’s and Under Armour have also canceled huge numbers of orders.
Kohl’s has also pulled back on order receipts and increased promotions to get through an inventory glut.
“We have taken action to address inventory, including increasing promotions, being aggressive on clearing excess inventory and pulling back on receipts,” said Kohl’s CFO Jill Timm in a call with investors.
Under Armour also said it made some proactive cancellations due to supply chain constraints to ensure that “the right inventory was coming in at the right time,” said interim president and CEO Colin Browne in a call with investors.
FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam publicly warned that a massive recession is coming.
Snyder writes:
Sadly, he is right on target.
For months, I have been warning that the economic numbers were telling us that big trouble was on the way, and now everyone can see it.
But unlike the “Great Recession” of 2008 and 2009, this time we are also going to have to deal with raging inflation even as economic activity slows down all around us.
In fact, the Wall Street Journal is ominously warning that U.S. consumers “are set to pay even more this winter” as heating costs continue to soar to absolutely ridiculous levels…
U.S. utility customers, faced with some of their largest bills in years, are set to pay even more this winter as natural-gas prices continue to climb.
Natural-gas prices have more than doubled this year because of a global supply shortage made worse by the war in Ukraine, and they are expected to remain elevated for months as fuel is needed to light and heat homes during the winter. The supply crunch has made it substantially more expensive for utilities to purchase or produce power, and those costs are being passed on to customers.
The cost of living has been rising much faster than our paychecks have for quite some time now, and a lot more pain is on the horizon.
I really like how Brandon Smith recently summarized the current state of the U.S. economy…
A common refrain from people who are critical of alternative economists is that we have been predicting crisis for so long that “eventually we will be right.” These are generally people who don’t understand the nature of economic decline – It’s like an avalanche that builds over time, then breaks and quickly escalates as it flows down the mountain. What they don’t grasp is that they are in the middle of an economic collapse RIGHT NOW, and they just can’t see it because they have been acclimated to the presence of the snow and cold.
Economic decline is a process that takes many years, and while you might get an event like the market crash of 1929 or the crash of 2008, these moments of panic are nothing more than the wreckage left behind by the great wave of tumbling ice that everyone should have seen coming far in advance, but they refused.
That is so true.
We are already in the midst of a raging economic crisis, but things will get so much worse during the months and years to come.
The crisis in Europe is a result of political mistakes. On one hand, sanctions against Russia, are favorable only to the U.S. And on the other, the imposition of the post-hydrocarbon economy on Europeans has shown its insolvency.
The ill-considered sanctions against Russia have exposed the most acute problems of Europe which is rapidly losing its economic power. A tremendous amount of businesses are on the verge of bankruptcy. A flood of migrants from Africa, the Middle East, and Ukraine requires more and more budget spending. Funds are also being used to support the Kiev regime. As a result, Europe’s economies are deteriorating and living standards are plummeting.
Enterprises are on the verge of closing
In Britain, 60% of enterprises are on the verge of closing due to higher electricity prices. This is reported by the analytical group Make UK, representing the interests of British industry. 13% of British factories have reduced working hours and 7% are temporarily closing down. Electricity bills have risen by more than 100% compared to last year.
In Germany, according to the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, the number of firms and individuals who went bankrupt in August alone rose 26% compared to the same period last year. The figure was significantly higher than German analysts had forecast. According to experts, during the autumn the number of bankruptcies will only increase. This is connected with the increase of the cost of production processes, in particular with the rise in prices of energy.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz acknowledged that many Germans have faced rising prices for fuel and food. Most countries in Europe were in a similar situation. But the authorities are sacrificing the quality of people’s lives in order to continue to exert pressure on Russia.
The crisis is just ahead
At the same time, many experts believe the stopping of the Nord Stream will cause Europe’s worst energy crisis in decades.
Manuela Schwesig, state premier of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Markus Söder, state premier of Bavaria, visit a site that will feed an existing pipeline network with liquefied natural gas in Lubmin, Germany, on August 30, 2022
This circumstance has already caused a sharp rise in the prices of energy resources on the European market. As a result, energy bills of European households have increased. According to Goldman Sachs’ analysts, its cumulative cost will peak in early 2023, increasing by 2 trillion euros. It has also led to record depreciation of the European currency over the past 20 years.
The increased cost of gas, heat, and electricity has an adverse effect on the living standard of the people. But an even more dangerous problem is the falling liquidity of European products produced at the new cost of energy. European products are becoming uncompetitive on the world market: their price is much higher because of the cost of electricity and gas.
European countries are themselves to blame for the problems they face this coming winter because of reduced gas supplies from Russia, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. According to him, “Europe reaps what it sows”, while Turkey “has no problems with gas supplies”.
The crisis in Europe is a result of political mistakes. On one hand, sanctions against Russia, are favorable only to the U.S. And on the other, the imposition of the post-hydrocarbon economy on Europeans has shown its insolvency.
As a result, energy prices in Asia and Latin America today are much lower. And so are the wages of production workers. In other words, European products are totally uncompetitive. And we see a decrease in the liquidity of those products on the market. As a consequence, the European economy begins to plunge into recession. In particular, Christian Sewing, Director General of Deutsche Bank, said on September 7 that Germany is no longer able to avoid recession. Already at the moment, it is buying significantly fewer raw materials from major suppliers such as Brazil, Argentina, and the U.S.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, a British think tank, predicts that GDP growth in 2023 will be: 5.3% in China, 5.1% in India, 1.2% in the United States, 0.3% in France, 0.3% in Brazil. And it will be negative in a number of countries: minus 0.6% in the UK, minus 1% in Germany, and minus 1.3% in Italy.
Poverty is coming
The next logical consequence will be mass production closures and rising unemployment. European technology companies are already reducing the number of high-paying engineering positions. In September, German wind turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa announced its intention to reduce the number of employees to 1,500 people.
In turn, rising unemployment will cause a drop in living standards and an additional burden on government budgets, as the fight against poverty requires additional social spending.
European economies survive through stimulus. But this exacerbates inflation. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said, “You can’t help everyone, so we in the West will be a bit poorer because of the high inflation, the high energy costs”.
Migrants are ruinous to the budget
Meanwhile, the energy crisis and production problems have been exacerbated by migration policies that require additional budgetary injections into the social sphere.
The migrant influx into European countries over the past two decades has been less than 1 million people a year. But already last year, 1.3 million people entered the countries, and this year, there were already 1.8 million people. We must take into account the fact that some immigrants enter Europe illegally and are not registered. They are primarily residents of Somalia, Nigeria, Gambia, Iran, Pakistan, Mali, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Syria.
Moreover, more than 10 million people left Ukraine since the end of February. Of these, at least 6 million people remain in European countries, while 3.7 million have already received refugee status. The average cost per such migrant is 7,000 euros per year. Even without Ukrainians, Germany alone spends 25 to 55 billion euros annually on refugee aid.
The European economy could afford these enormous expenditures before the energy crisis. But now the situation is such that expenditures are only increasing while revenues are falling.
Following the catastrophic electricity and heating bills, Europe’s population is facing mass unemployment, followed by a decline in social support from the state. These processes inevitably lead to an overall decline in living standards.
The closure of the Nord Stream 1 (NS1) pipeline, the world’s largest natural gas pipeline, is a historic event that, instead of hurting Russia, is threatening to de-industrialize the entirety of Europe
There is a pretty good chance that Europe is done for as it pertains to manufacturing.
The soaring cost of energy has made it prohibitively expensive for primary-metals producers and other heavy industries to continue doing business across the continent, which is boycotting Russian energy over Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Anti-Russia sanctions have all but crippled the European economy, forcing major companies like Slovalco, an aluminum producer in Slovakia, to close up shop.
For the first time, cheap Russian energy is no longer flowing into Europe like it has for many decades, including throughout the Cold War and during other periods of high tension between Moscow and the West.
The closure of the Nord Stream 1 (NS1) pipeline, the world’s largest natural gas pipeline, is a historic event that, instead of hurting Russia, is threatening to de-industrialize the entirety of Europe. (Related: Germany’s leaders are finally waking up to the fact that no more energy from Russia means no more economy for Europe.)
“Unlike the U.S., Europe leaned on manufacturing and heavy industry to keep its economy chugging in recent decades,” reported The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). “A bigger chunk of its economy comes from the likes of steelmakers, chemicals producers and car makers.”
“Europe’s energy crisis has left few businesses untouched, from steel and aluminum to cars, glass, ceramics, sugar and toilet-paper makers. Some industries, such as the energy-intensive metals sector, are shutting factories that analysts and executives say might never reopen, imperiling thousands of jobs.”
Is this the end of metal production in Europe?
Up until now, the assumption has been that this is all temporary. Western media outlets say Putin can only last so much longer and that eventually, everything will get back to “normal.”
Meanwhile, the “green” energy transition has proven to be even more disastrous for countries trying to wait out the pain. Some have had to restart their “dirty” energy industries in order to keep the lights on.
By the looks of things, Europe as we currently know it will not survive on the current trajectory. It would need to abandon the sanctions, fire back up the coal and gas plants, and once again become energy independent.
Even then it might not save Europe’s heavy industries which, once shut down, are very difficult to start back up again.
“… the continent might never again have access to the cheap Russian gas that helped it compete with the resource-rich U.S. and offset high labor costs, rigid employment rules, and stringent environmental regulations,” write the WSJ’s Joe Wallace, David Uberti, Georgi Kantchev, and William Boston.
Before energy prices started to go crazy last year, Slovalco was paying about $45 per megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity. In late August, that same MWh or electricity hit about $1,000 across Europe, a more than 2,200 percent increase.
Keeping an energy-intensive business alive in such a volatile climate is an economic impossibility, and Slovalco knows it.
“The volatility of the price of electricity these days – it’s crazy,” says Milan Veselý, who has worked his entire life at Slovalco. “This is probably the end of metal production in Europe. This is the way we are actually killing industry.”
The company did not even attempt to renew its power contract for 2023, which at recent peak prices would have cost $2.5 billion. With only an aluminum recycling component left to its business, Slovalco recently had to let go of 67 percent of its workforce.
“We need immediate emergency aid now, otherwise we are threatened with de-industrialization in Germany,” added Franziska Erdle, general manager of WV Metalle, another major metal producer in Europe.
As the West falls apart due to rampant corruption and idiocy, we will keep you up to date with the latest at Collapse.news.
Darned Europe doofuses, why did it not curb the obscene profits from the oil companies before this? Lou
The European Commission has reportedly backpedaled on the gas price cap and is currently working on a mechanism to tax the windfall profits of energy companies. Brussels is also urging EU nations to impose various energy-saving measures to better prepare for peak consumption during the winter. -RT
The West has limited options and none are good for it. They either admit defeat and walk back the sanctions on Russia, or they allow the slaves to starve and freeze this winter. I think we can guess which option they will choose considering they have proven time and time again that they don’t care even a little bit about the slaves.
As winter approaches, Russia seems to have the upper hand. The country has been withholding and cutting natural gas supplies to European Union countries in response to sanctions placed on it over the Ukraine “invasion.”
Because of the EU’s inability to face “reality”, they face a cold and dark winter. Hungary’s State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Trade Tamas Menczer, says that the bloc may rethink restrictions on Moscow as soon as the autumn.
The restrictions imposed on Russian trade to punish it for attacking Ukraine have failed to change Moscow’s behavior and actually rewarded it with increased revenues after they triggered a spike in energy prices, the MP said during an appearance on M1 TV on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the European countries that imposed the sanctions are facing energy shortages. -RT
The Hungarian MP confirmed that his country, which criticized the EU’s drive to decouple the economy of the bloc from Russian energy, opposed the idea of introducing a price cap on gas bought from foreign nations. He called the proposal absurd and impractical, citing Moscow’s promises to cut supplies to customers that try to dictate the price.
Last week, Hungarian Parliament Speaker Laszlo Kover claimed that the EU is the “loser” in the Ukraine conflict due to the economic damage caused by the sanctions and Russia’s response to them.
The European Commission has reportedly backpedaled on the gas price cap and is currently working on a mechanism to tax the windfall profits of energy companies. Brussels is also urging EU nations to impose various energy-saving measures to better prepare for peak consumption during the winter. -RT
“Reality knocks on the door of every country,” Menczer said, explaining why he believes the sanctions will be lifted sooner rather than later. Member states are set to review their sanctions policies later in the autumn. Failure to reevaluate the sanctions will destroy the EU’s economy and the slaves residing there. If the West removes the sanctions, they will be admitting defeat to Russia. So what will the West do?
The West has limited options and none are good for it. They either admit defeat and walk back the sanctions on Russia, or they allow the slaves to starve and freeze this winter. I think we can guess which option they will choose considering they have proven time and time again that they don’t care even a little bit about the slaves.
The migrants are able to slip in and out of Sweden because there is no punishment for doing so, unlike in countries like Switzerland and Germany, where refugees who return to their home countries without permission face losing their asylum status.“If someone, a Syrian refugee, regularly vacations in Syria, he cannot honestly claim to be persecuted in Syria,” said then-German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer in 2019.
A new survey has found that almost four out of five refugees living in Sweden have vacationed in the countries that they originally fled from.
Yes, really.
The survey was conducted by polling firm Novus on behalf of the Swedish online newspaper Bulletin.
It found that 79 percent of people who arrived in Sweden as refugees, supposedly fleeing war or persecution, have returned to their home country since arriving in Sweden.
“According to the survey, they do not wish, however, to return home permanently,” reports Remix News. “When asked whether they plan to permanently return to their country of birth in the future, just 2 percent say they do, while 16 percent say maybe — 81 percent of those who arrived in Sweden from non-European countries say they do not, primarily because they believe Sweden to be a better country to raise their children.”
The migrants are able to slip in and out of Sweden because there is no punishment for doing so, unlike in countries like Switzerland and Germany, where refugees who return to their home countries without permission face losing their asylum status.
“If someone, a Syrian refugee, regularly vacations in Syria, he cannot honestly claim to be persecuted in Syria,” said then-German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer in 2019.
The results of the survey once again highlight how the vast majority of so-called “refugees” aren’t refugees at all, they’re economic migrants exploiting the emotional cache of the term “refugee” to abuse the system, and in doing so harming the interests of actual refugees.
Over the last 20 years, Sweden has taken in more refugees per capita than any other western country, a process that has seen Sweden go from being one of the safest countries in Europe to the second most dangerous.
The unemployment rate for migrants is four times higher than native Swedes, with some migrant-heavy areas seeing jobless levels as high as 78 percent.
As we highlight in the video below, with the right-wing bloc, dominated by the anti-mass migration Sweden Democrats, set to win the election, Swedes finally appear to be waking up to the pitfalls of accelerated multiculturalism.
Could you imagine being sent to prison for three years if you dared to set your thermostat above 66 degrees Fahrenheit? As you will see below, this is a proposed regulation that is actually being considered in a major European country right now. If you have not been paying much attention to what is happening in Europe, you need to wake up. Natural gas in Europe is seven times more expensive than it was early last year, and that is because of the war in Ukraine. Over the past few decades, the Europeans foolishly allowed themselves to become extremely dependent on gas from Russia. In fact, more than 55 percent of the natural gas that Germany uses normally comes from Russia. But now the war has changed everything, and Europe is facing an extremely harsh winter of severe shortages, mandatory rationing, and absolutely insane heating bills.
Things are going to get very cold and very dark all over Europe in the months ahead, and those Europeans that choose to rebel against the new restrictions that are being implemented could literally find themselves in prison…
Switzerland is considering jailing anyone who heats their rooms above 19C for up to three years if the country is forced to ration gas due to the Ukraine war.
The country could also give fines to those who violate the proposed new regulations.
Speaking to Blick, Markus Sporndli, who is a spokesman for the Federal Department of Finance, explained that the rate for fines on a daily basis could start at 30 Swiss Francs (£26).
19 degrees Celsius is just 66 degrees Fahrenheit.
If you live in Europe, prepare to dress very warmly this winter.
Some may be anticipating that they will just use portable radiant heaters to keep things toasty, but apparently using such heaters “would not be allowed” under the new regulations that Switzerland is considering…
Blick also reported that radiant heaters would not be allowed and saunas and swimming pools would have to stay cold.
This is serious.
We have never seen anything like this before, and the longer the war in Ukraine stretches on the worse the energy crisis in Europe will become.
An end to the era of cheap energy also means that a severe economic slowdown is in the cards, and this is already starting to show up in the numbers…
Europe is showing signs of heading into a recession as multiple economic surveys show the region’s services and manufacturing sectors slowing down while a large number of the continent’s citizens are struggling to cope with rising prices.
The S&P Global Eurozone Composite Output Index fell to an 18-month low in August at 48.9, according to a Sept. 5 news release (pdf).
The eurozone private sector “moved further into contractionary territory” in August. Both services and manufacturing output fell for the month.
Of course, what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.
In yet another truly astonishing announcement that demonstrates the desperation of this hour, German steelmaker ArcelorMittal, one of the largest steel production facilities in Europe, has shuttered operations due to high energy prices. (See their announcement here, in German.)
“With gas and electricity prices increasing tenfold within just a few months, we are no longer competitive in a market that is 25% supplied by imports,” said CEO Reiner Blaschek.
This comes after announced closures of aluminum smelters, copper smelters and ammonia production plants over the last few weeks. Ammonia — necessary for fertilizer — is now 70% offline in the EU.
Many more factories will be forced to shut down in the coming months.
Deeply alarmed by what is taking place, 40 CEOs from Europe’s metals industry have jointly issued an open letter in which they warn that their companies are facing an “existential threat to our future”…
Ahead of Friday’s emergency summit, the business leaders of Europe’s non-ferrous metals industry are writing together to raise the alarm about Europe’s worsening energy crisis and its existential threat to our future. Our sector has already been forced to make unprecedented curtailments in the last 12 months. We are deeply concerned that the winter ahead could deliver a decisive blow to many of our operations, and we call on EU and Member State leaders to take emergency action to preserve their strategic electricity-intensive industries and prevent permanent job losses.
50% of the EU’s aluminium and zinc capacity has already been forced offline due to the power crisis, as well as significant curtailments in silicon and ferroalloys production and further impacts felt across copper and nickel sectors. In the last month, several companies have had to announce indefinite closures and many more are on the brink ahead of a life-or-death winter for many operations. Producers face electricity and gas costs over ten times higher than last year, far exceeding the sales price for their products. We know from experience that once a plant is closed it very often becomes a permanent situation, as re-opening implies significant uncertainty and cost.
This is what an economic collapse looks like.
Things are already so bad that scientists are even considering shutting down the Large Hadron Collider…
Europe’s energy crisis is being felt by everyone – including the scientists working deep underground in Switzerland at the Large Hadron Collider.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, is even considering taking its particle accelerators offline.
This is due to the accelerators’ high energy demands, and the organisation’s desire to keep the region’s electricity grid stable.
So at least one good thing could potentially come out of this crisis.
But overall, the months ahead are going to be an immensely uncomfortable time for Europe.
As conditions become tougher and tougher, ordinary Europeans are going to become angrier and angrier.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is openly admitting that there will be “civil unrest”, but he insists that Europeans must make sacrifices in order to support the war in Ukraine…
Vladimir Putin’s ‘energy blackmail’ over Europe could lead to ‘civil unrest’ this winter, the NATO Secretary General has warned.
Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged that winter ‘will be hard’ as ‘families and businesses feel the crunch of soaring energy prices and costs of living’ in the coming months.
Writing in the Financial Times, the boss of the Western security alliance said that it is worth paying the price to support Ukraine.
Eventually, there will be tremendous civil unrest in major cities in the United States as well.
We are still only in the very early stages of this new global energy crisis, and it is going to turn all of our lives upside down.
Meanwhile, we are also plunging into a horrific global food crisis. As I detailed a few days ago, even the head of the UN is admitting that there will be “multiple famines” in 2023.
Life as we know it is about to change.
Right now, all eyes are on Europe because things are starting to get really crazy over there.
Europe is going to descend into “the new Dark Ages” this winter, and the entire world will experience extreme pain as a result.
The finance guru has issued a dire warning about the impending crash of the dollar and the US economy
“I predict the biggest crash in world history is coming,” the author of the best-selling book ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ told his followers in an email on Sunday.
Famed writer and economist Robert Kiyosaki has warned investors of an approaching huge stock market disruption, advising to buy cryptocurrencies before they usurp the US dollar and transform the entire financial system.
“I predict the biggest crash in world history is coming,” the author of the best-selling book ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ told his followers in an email on Sunday.
Kiyosaki projected a lengthy downturn, noting however that bear markets are the best times for investors to snag bargains and score big returns. He also stated that the US dollar would crash the existing economic system, leading to mainstream acceptance of crypto, as it isn’t controlled by the government.
“It’s not enough to WANT to get into crypto,” the finance guru wrote, adding “Now is the time you NEED to get into crypto, before the biggest economic crash in history.”
In May, Kiyosaki described the most popular crypto as worthless, saying on his radio show “I trade bitcoin. But I don’t think it has any value. I just play the game.”
“We are essentially on the brink of another banking crisis, a collapse of our industrial base and households, and thus on the brink of the collapse of our economies.”
Forecaster, associate professor, CEO and economist Tuomas Malinen, PhD, says that economic conditions in Europe are much worse than most people – including Europeans themselves, who are being kept in the dark by their politicians as to what is transpiring – think.
In addition to the energy crisis – several of Europe’s largest steel mills just closed down because energy prices are too high – Europe faces another major banking crisis.
It turns out that the energy sector, like many other sectors, is heavily leveraged. And as the markets teeter on the brink of collapse, energy companies risk going kaput, which is why bailouts are now being proposed as a solution – just like they were back in 2008, by the way.
“I am telling you, people, that the situation in #Europe is much worse than many understand,” Malinen tweeted in a four-part thread.
“We are essentially on the brink of another banking crisis, a collapse of our industrial base and households, and thus on the brink of the collapse of our economies.”
Malinen says Europeans are “at the mercy of the authorities”
Because unelected bureaucrats control much of Europe via the European Union (EU) and its European Commission, citizens across the continent have very little say or even knowledge as to the decisions being made in the shadows.
“We are also totally at the mercy of the authorities, and we have very little knowledge of what they have planned,” Malinen says.
“Will they be able to stop the onset of the banking crisis, yet again? I don’t know, but I am doubtful.”
Malinen shared a link to a page from GNS Economics about the so-called “Great Reset,” what it entails, and how it is the endgame of the current situation transpiring in Europe.
The three main pillars of the Great Reset that were presented by World Economic Forum (WEF) head Klaus Schwab back on June 3, 2020, sound a whole lot like what Europe is currently facing:
• Governments should “steer” the markets towards “fairer outcomes” using taxation, regulatory and fiscal policies, wealth taxes, and the removal of subsidies for fossil fuels – as well as create new rules governing intellectual property, trade, and competition
• Governments should ensure that investments advance “shared goals” such as “equitability” and “sustainability,” two globalist buzzwords that imply a new global system of communism, i.e., a one-world order
• Governments should “harness” innovations that match the agenda of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, addressing both health and social challenges
In order to bring about his Great Reset, Schwab and his minions first have to tear down the old system, which is exactly what is taking place right now with Europe at the forefront of that engineered collapse.
The rest of the West will follow in its footsteps, but right now all eyes are on Europe and its impending collapse.
“In any case, the speed of deterioration is massive now, and it’s only a matter of time when markets catch up,” Malinen warned. “I am betting that we still have a few weeks (months at max.) before ‘mayhem’ truly begins.”
“Take precautionary measures. Stock: 1) Cash. 2) Food. 3) Water. 4) Wood (if you have a stove). 5) Other necessities.”
Malinen stressed in his tweet series that people need to make sure they have lots of cash on hand an “no meaningful interest in banks,” along with the other necessities.
“Are you enjoying this yet?” someone else on Twitter responded to Malinen’s message. “They all clearly said what they are going to do! ‘Build Back Better’ – so it has to be destroyed first.”
The collapse of Western civilization is well underway. To keep up with the latest, visit Collapse.news.
Here’s your ‘reserve currency’ thought for the day: Every US dollar is a check written on an account that is overdrawn by 30 trillion dollars.
The only thing keeping the USD from vanishing into the ether is the trust of credulous people who continue to accept it as legal tender.
How dumb is that? For decades the US has been running a scam in which it exchanges its fishwrap currency for things of genuine value. (oil, manufactured goods, and labor) But now the Biden troupe has scrapped that system altogether and divided the world into warring camps.
Let me get this straight: The sanctions are actually hurting the US and helping Russia, so the experts think we should impose more sanctions? Is that it?
The EU is sinking into recession, supply lines have been severely disrupted, food shortages are steadily emerging, and gas and oil prices are through-the-roof. By every objective standard, the sanctions have not only failed but backfired spectacularly. Can’t the Biden people see the damage they’re doing? Are they completely divorced from reality?
First published on Global Research on July 7, 2022
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“The ferocity of the confrontation in Ukraine shows that we’re talking about much more than the fate of the regime in Kiev. The architecture of the entire world order is at stake.” Sergei Naryshkin, Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence.
***
Here’s your ‘reserve currency’ thought for the day: Every US dollar is a check written on an account that is overdrawn by 30 trillion dollars.
It’s true. The “full faith and credit” of the US Treasury is largely a myth held together by an institutional framework that rests on a foundation of pure sand. In fact, the USD is not worth the paper it is printed on; it is an IOU flailing in an ocean of red ink.
The only thing keeping the USD from vanishing into the ether is the trust of credulous people who continue to accept it as legal tender.
But why do people remain confident in the dollar when its flaws are known to all? After all, America’s $30 trillion National Debt is hardly a secret, nor is the additional $9 trillion that’s piled up on the Fed’s balance sheet. That is a stealth debt of which the American people are completely unaware, but they are responsible for all the same.
In order to answer that question, we need to look at how the system actually works and how the dollar is propped up by the numerous institutions that were created following WW2. These institutions provide an environment for conducting history’s longest and most flagrant swindle, the exchange of high-ticket manufactured goods, raw materials and hard-labor for slips of green paper with dead presidents on them.
One can only marvel at the genius of the elites who concocted this scam and then imposed it wholesale on the masses without a peep of protest. Of course, the system is accompanied by various enforcement mechanisms that swiftly remove anyone who tries to either break free from the dollar or, God help us, create an alternate system altogether. (Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi come to mind.) But the fact is– aside from the institutional framework and the ruthless extermination of dollar opponents– there’s no reason why humanity should remain yoked to a currency that is buried beneath a mountain of debt and whose real value is virtually unknowable.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when the dollar was the strongest currency in the world and deserved its spot at the top of the heap. Following WW1, the US was “the owner of the majority of the world’s gold” which was why an international delegation “decided that the world’s currencies would no longer be linked to gold but could be pegged to the U.S. dollar, “because the greenback was, itself, linked to gold.” Here’s more from an article at Investopedia:
“The arrangement came to be known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. It established the authority of central banks, which would maintain fixed exchange rates between their currencies and the dollar. In turn, the United States would redeem U.S. dollars for gold on demand….
The U.S dollar was officially crowned the world’s reserve currency and was backed by the world’s largest gold reserves thanks to the Bretton Woods Agreement. Instead of gold reserves, other countries accumulated reserves of U.S. dollars. Needing a place to store their dollars, countries began buying U.S. Treasury securities, which they considered to be a safe store of money.
The demand for Treasury securities, coupled with the deficit spending needed to finance the Vietnam War and the Great Society domestic programs, caused the United States to flood the market with paper money….
The demand for gold was such that President Richard Nixon was forced to intervene and de-link the dollar from gold, which led to the floating exchange rates that exist today. Although there have been periods of stagflation, which is defined as high inflation and high unemployment, the U.S. dollar has remained the world’s reserve currency.” (“How the U.S. Dollar Became the World’s Reserve Currency”, Investopedia)
But now the gold is gone and what’s left is a steaming pile of debt. So, how on earth has the dollar managed to preserve its status as the world’s preeminent currency?
Proponents of the dollar system will tell you it has something to do with “the size and strength of the U.S. economy and the dominance of the U.S. financial markets.” But that’s nonsense.
The truth is, reserve currency status has nothing to do with “the size and strength” of America’s post-industrial, service-oriented, bubble-driven, third-world-sh**hole economy. Nor does it have anything to do with the alleged safety of US Treasuries” which– next to the dollar– is the biggest Ponzi flim-flam of all time.
The real reason the dollar has remained the world’s premier currency is because of the cartelization of Central Banking.
The Western Central Banks are a de facto monopoly run by a small cabal of inter-breeding bottom-feeders who coordinate and collude on monetary policy in order to preserve their maniacal death-grip on the financial markets and the global economy. It’s a Monetary Mafia and– as George Carlin famously said: “You and I are not in it. You and I are not in the big club.” Bottom line: It is the relentless manipulation of interest rates, forward guidance, and Quantitative Easing (QE) that has kept the dollar in its lofty but undeserved spot.
But all that is about to change due entirely to Biden’s reckless foreign policy which is forcing critical players in the global economy to create their own rival system. This is a real tragedy for the West which has enjoyed a century of nonstop wealth extraction from the developing world.
Now– due to the economic sanctions on Russia– an entirely new order is emerging in which the dollar will be substituted for national currencies (processed through an independent financial settlement system) in bilateral trade deals until– later this year– Russia launches an exchange-traded commodities-backed currency that will be used by trading partners in Asia and Africa.
Washington’s theft of Russia’s foreign reserves in April turbo-charged the current process which was further accelerated by banning Russia from foreign markets. In short, US economic sanctions and boycotts have expanded the non-dollar zone by many orders of magnitude and forced the creation of a new monetary order.
How dumb is that? For decades the US has been running a scam in which it exchanges its fishwrap currency for things of genuine value. (oil, manufactured goods, and labor) But now the Biden troupe has scrapped that system altogether and divided the world into warring camps.
But, why?
To punish Russia, is that it?
Yes, that’s it.
But, if that’s the case, then shouldn’t we try to figure out whether the sanctions actually work or not before we recklessly change the system?
Too late for that. The war on Russia has begun and the early results are already pouring in. Just look at the way we’ve destroyed Russia’s currency, the ruble. It’s shocking! Here’s the scoop from an article at CBS:
“The Russian ruble is the best-performing currency in the world this year….
Two months after the ruble’s value fell to less than a U.S. penny amid the swiftest, toughest economic sanctions in modern history, Russia’s currency has mounted a stunning turnaround. The ruble has jumped 40% against the dollar since January.
Normally, a country facing international sanctions and a major military conflict would see investors fleeing and a steady outflow of capital, causing its currency to drop….
Huh? You mean the attack on the ruble didn’t work after all?
Sure looks that way. But that doesn’t mean the sanctions are a failure. Oh, no. Just at look at the effect they’ve had on Russian commodities. Export receipts are way-down, right? Here’s more from CBS:
“Commodity prices are currently sky-high, and even though there is a drop in the volume of Russian exports due to embargoes and sanctioning, the increase in commodity prices more than compensates for these drops,” said Tatiana Orlova, lead emerging markets economist at Oxford Economics.
Russia is pulling in nearly $20 billion a month from energy exports. Since the end of March, many foreign buyers have complied with a demand to pay for energy in rubles, pushing up the currency’s value.” (“Russia’s ruble is the strongest currency in the world this year“, CBS News)
You’re kidding me? You mean the ruble is surging and Putin is raking in more dough on commodities than ever before?
Yep, and it’s the same deal with Russia’s trade surplus. Take a look at this excerpt from an article in The Economist:
“Russia’s exports… have held up surprisingly well, including those directed to the West. Sanctions permit the sale of oil and gas to most of the world to continue uninterrupted. And a spike in energy prices has boosted revenues further.
As a result, analysts expect Russia’s trade surplus to hit record highs in the coming months. The IIF reckons that in 2022 the current-account surplus, which includes trade and some financial flows, could come in at $250bn (15% of last year’s GDP), more than double the $120bn recorded in 2021. That sanctions have boosted Russia’s trade surplus, and thus helped finance the war, is disappointing, says Mr Vistesen. Ms Ribakova reckons that the efficacy of financial sanctions may have reached its limits. A decision to tighten trade sanctions must come next.
But such measures could take time to take effect. Even if the EU enacts its proposal to ban Russian oil, the embargo would be phased in so slowly that the bloc’s oil imports from Russia would fall by just 19% this year, says Liam Peach of Capital Economics, a consultancy. The full impact of these sanctions would be felt only at the start of 2023—by which point Mr. Putin will have amassed billions to fund his war.” ( “Russia is on track for a record trade surplus”, The Economist)
Let me get this straight: The sanctions are actually hurting the US and helping Russia, so the experts think we should impose more sanctions? Is that it?
Precisely. Now that we have shot ourselves in the foot, the experts think it would be wise to shoot the other one too.
Am I the only one who is struck by the insanity of this policy? Check out this clip from an article at RT:
“Russia could earn a record $100 billion from gas sales to European countries in 2022 due to the sharp rise in energy prices, French newspaper Les Echos reported this week, citing Citibank analysts.
According to the paper, the projected income from gas sales will be almost twice as much as last year. The analysis does not take into account profits from the sale of other Russian commodities, such as oil, coal, and other minerals.
Les Echos reports that, despite sanctions and warnings of a sweeping embargo on Russian energy, the 27 EU countries continue to send roughly $200 million per day to Gazprom.”(“Russian gas revenues projected to hit new highs”, RT)
So the revenues from gas and oil sales are literally flooding Moscow’s coffers like never before. Meanwhile, energy prices in the EU and America have skyrocketed to 40-year highs.
Can you see how counterproductive this policy is?
The EU is sinking into recession, supply lines have been severely disrupted, food shortages are steadily emerging, and gas and oil prices are through-the-roof. By every objective standard, the sanctions have not only failed but backfired spectacularly. Can’t the Biden people see the damage they’re doing? Are they completely divorced from reality?
Imagine if the Ukrainians use Biden’s new artillery battery (HIMARS) to shell cities in Russia? Then what?
Then Putin takes off the gloves and shuts off the flow of hydrocarbons to Europe immediately. That’s what’s going to happen if Washington continues to escalate. You can bet on it. If Russia’s “Special Military Operation” suddenly becomes a war, the lights across Europe will go dark, homes will begin to freeze, factories will go silent, and the continent will slide headlong into a protracted and painful depression.
Does anyone in Washington think about these things or are they all so drunk on their own press clippings they’ve completely lost touch with reality?
Here’s more from an article at RT:
“Even as the collective West continues to insist – against all observable reality – that the conflict in Ukraine is going well for Kiev, major media outlets are becoming increasingly uneasy with the situation on the economic front. More and more observers are admitting that the embargoes imposed by the US and its allies aren’t crushing the Russian economy, as originally intended, but rather their own.…
“Russia is winning the economic war,” the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott declared on Thursday. “It is now three months since the west launched its economic war against Russia, and it is not going according to plan. On the contrary, things are going very badly indeed,” he wrote…
In a May 30 essay, Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins also said that the embargo had failed…
Did you catch that part about “Russia winning the economic war”? What do you think that means in practical terms?
Does it mean that Washington’s failed attempt to maintain its global hegemony by “weakening” Russia is actually putting enormous strains on the Transatlantic Alliance and NATO that will trigger a re-calibration of relations leading to a defiant rejection of the “rules-based system?”
Is that what it means? Is Europe going to split with Washington and leave America to sink beneath its $30 trillion ocean of red ink?
Yes, that’s exactly what it means.
Uncle Sam’s 30-Year Bender
Proponents of Washington’s proxy war have no idea of the magnitude of their mistake or how much damage they are inflicting on their own country. The Ukraine debacle is the culmination of 30 years of bloody interventions that have brought us to a tipping point where the nation’s fortunes are about to take a dramatic turn for the worse. As the dollar-zone shrinks, standards of living will plunge, unemployment will soar, and the economy will go into a downward-death spiral.
Washington has greatly underestimated its vulnerability to catastrophic geopolitical blowback that is about to bring the New American Century to a swift and excruciating end.
A wise leader would do everything in his power to pull us back from the brink.
*
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image is from Shutterstock
The original source of this article is Global Research
And if the three great powers – Russia, China, and India – manage to build strategic relations with the Islamic world in working out a new world order, it will be tantamount to a final verdict in the Anglo-Saxon bid for global domination.
With Covid quarantines no longer a hindrance, summits have returned to the diplomatic agenda. First, the West returned to face-to-face meetings – EU and NATO summits have been taking place for some time now – and now it is the turn of the East.
Top Asian leaders have not met collectively for more than three years, but in a week’s time, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) will gather in the Uzbek city of Samarkand and will bring together all its leaders. Until recently, it was not entirely clear that Chinese President Xi Jinping would be coming, as some observers had assumed he would not leave Beijing before the Communist Party congress in mid-October. But it has since been announced that the Chinese leader will visit Kazakhstan next week, so a trip to Uzbekistan is also a foregone conclusion.
The meeting between Xi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin will be the second this year, but the first since the start of the military operation in Ukraine. Also, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will meet for the first time ever in Samarkand. For the two neighbors with a history of fraught relations, the SCO is becoming an important platform for dialogue. And the SCO itself is rapidly outgrowing its original format as a Russo-Chinese security alliance in Central Asia and involving just the Central Asian republics. The group now boasts four nuclear states – that is, virtually all of the non-Western members of the club (except North Korea).
In Uzbekistan, the SCO ‘eight’ will turn into a ‘nine’ as the procedure for Iran’s accession will be completed. However, the organization will not be limited to that number for long – it has already announced its intention to start the procedure to transfer Belarus from an observer to a full-fledged member. And it will not stop there. Several more countries, including some influential ones, want to join the SCO.
In recent years, there have been four observers to the organization (as candidates for membership), but now Tehran has come on board and Belarus is starting the transition procedure, so that leaves Afghanistan and Mongolia. Whereas previously the main obstacle to Kabul’s inclusion was the presence of US troops in the country, this problem no longer exists, so its acceptance into the SCO will undoubtedly occur. This will not happen immediately, but rather once the situation in the country has stabilized and a full-fledged system of governance and law and order have been established (naturally, with the help of SCO countries).
Mongolia could become a full-fledged participant at any time – none of the member states have any objections – but in the past it has been slow to do so, preferring to remain an observer. However, rising global tensions will also affect Ulaanbaatar’s position, while the growing queue of aspiring SCO members may also prompt its leadership to step up.
There had been aspirants to join the SCO before, but this year they have moved from words to deeds. And we are not only talking about the countries that were among the ‘partners in dialogue’ (another format of interaction).
These aspirants comprise nine states: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The last three obtained the status of dialogues partners only a year ago but are already looking to upgrade to being able to join the organization in full. Syria and Myanmar also want to be involved, along with the United Arab Emirates, which seeks immediate accession. Although such a request cannot be granted, it is in itself a sign of the rapidly growing interest in the organization, which is driven by the Sino-Russian partnership.
The reasons for this are clear: although the consolidation of the non-Western world has been steadily gaining momentum over the past decade, things have accelerated since the beginning of 2020. First, Covid and the resulting lockdowns led to a crisis of globalization, then the operation in Ukraine forced the West to insist that whoever does not go along with the blockade of Russia is for Putin.
And then the provocation of the Taiwan issue hurt the prospects for normalizing relations between the West and the Middle Kingdom. The whole world is being forced to pick a side.
Under these conditions, the optimal model for many influential countries in the Islamic world is to demonstrate their independence, which is seen as carving out a position equidistant from the two poles, i.e. Russia-China and the United States-EU.
But how can US military allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia find this equidistance? By joining the SCO.
While it is true that the SCO is not a military bloc, belonging to the organization clearly indicates an unwillingness to participate in any Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese efforts. That is why Recep Erdogan will fly to Samarkand, and possibly Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as well. In this case, the SCO ‘nine’ will turn, albeit unofficially so far, into a club of 11, that is, a platform where Russia, China, India, and the four most important countries of the Islamic world meet: Saudi Arabia, ‘the richest and most influential; Iran, ‘the oldest and most passionate’; Turkey, ‘the most developed and ambitious’; and Pakistan, ‘the only nuclear one’. The SCO observers also include Egypt, ‘the main country in the Arab world; and Qatar, ‘the information and propaganda giant’.
These Islamic countries admittedly do not have the smoothest relations among themselves (especially Saudi Arabia and Iran), and in the past, the West has actively used their discord. Russia and China, however, are not interested in pitting Muslims against each other but in involving them in building a new, post-Western world order. And if the three great powers – Russia, China, and India – manage to build strategic relations with the Islamic world in working out a new world order, it will be tantamount to a final verdict in the Anglo-Saxon bid for global domination.
The Atlanticists are no longer betting on a quarrel between Russia and China but on pitting India and China against each other. And they are virtually certain that they will be able to keep the Islamic world in their orbit (and even use it against Beijing and Moscow). Therefore, the ‘Islamization’ of the SCO will be the most important challenge to the Anglo-Saxon project – and also a sign of its complete collapse.
“…how the world’s money-grubbing tech gurus are actively trying to build themselves survival bunkers to weather the coming apocalypse that they are helping engineer.”
Survival of the Richest author Douglas Rushkoff published an exposé the other day at The Guardian about how the world’s money-grubbing tech gurus are actively trying to build themselves survival bunkers to weather the coming apocalypse that they are helping engineer.
Rushkoff says he was recently invited to attend a secret gathering of five tech billionaires somewhere out in the desert, during which he was asked all kinds of questions about how to build the best and most secure underground bunkers.
These billionaires’ biggest concern seemed to be about how to ensure that the security forces they hire do not turn on them once everything hits the fan. Demonstrating their total lack of empathy – meaning these tech billionaires are sociopaths – they simply could not comprehend that treating people right now will serve them much better than trying to forcefully ensure their own survival at the expense of everyone else.
“How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” asked the CEO of a brokerage house, recognizing that Rushkoff knows a thing or two about survival and the logistics surrounding its success. (Related: Ever since covid, the doomsday bunker business has been booming.)
“The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down,” Rushkoff explains in his piece about the primary focus of these tech billionaires.
Nobody is going to want to protect the tech billionaires once everything collapses
It turns out that the bulk of the private meeting was centered around the security issue and how to keep security forces paid, fed, and happy so that they continue to protect the very tech billionaires who destroyed the world in the first place.
While one of them suggested simply locking their food behind combinations that only they knew, at least one of the tech billionaires proposed forcing their security teams to wear disciplinary shock collars to ensure their compliance.
Another brought up the idea of building non-human robots to serve as guards and workers for their underground, dystopian “paradises” that they expect to survive in once society collapses.
Rushkoff, who describes himself as a “Marxist media theorist,” tried to reason with the men about how a more pro-social approach centered around partnership and solidarity is the most promising for preserving “our collective, long-term challenges.” It turns out that none of them wanted to hear any of this.
“The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained,” Rushkoff writes about what he said to the tech billionaires. “Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.”
In the end, Rushkoff says he came to the realization that billionaire tech moguls “are actually the losers” in this whole scenario. They will likely be the first to go once all bets are off because We the People see them for who they are.
“The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules,” Rushkoff says.
“More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where ‘winning’ means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.”
“Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.”
The latest news about the coming collapse can be found at Collapse.news.
The Russian president is expected to meet with China’s Xi Jingping
Up yours, Europe, all you know is war and colonialism. The world has had enough of the likes of youz. lou
“China has taken a responsible attitude and persuaded all parties not to escalate tensions or incite war,” she said. “Those who follow the U.S.’s lead in fanning up the flame and then shifting the blame onto others are truly irresponsible.”
Putin sends his thanks and warm regards to the US, the UK, and the EU (lou):
Fortune magazine, citing the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, noted that Moscow pulled in $157 billion in “the past six months from fossil fuel exports—with EU nations importing 54% of this amount.”
FILE: Russian President Vladimir Putin said the world is headed to a multipolar world.
Russian President Vladimir Putin took an unveiled swipe at the U.S. Wednesday and said “Western nations” are hurting everyone — including their own people in their effort to maintain global order.
“The West is failing,” Putin said. “The future is Asia.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Putin will meet with his Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Uzbekistan next week, according to Russian media.
Russia sees China as an economic lifeline. China is Russia’s top trade partner with total trade last year jumping 35.9 percent to a record $146.9 billion. Reuters said trade between the two countries jumped 50 percent after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. That trend has continued. During the first five months of the year, trade between the countries hit $65.81 billion, up 28.9 percent from 2021.
FILE: Chinese President Xi Jinping seen in a national address.
BUDDING FRIENDSHIP Despite attempts from the Biden administration, China has refused to speak out against the Russian invasion. There’s a theory that when Putin met with Xi at the Winter Olympics in Beijing, he got the Chinese leader’s blessing before the conflict. Russia would be sunk without China’s support.
Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, has mentioned a new “world order.”
“We, together with you [China], and with our sympathizers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order,” Lavrov said in a video statement in April.
President Joe Biden mentioned an emerging ‘new world order’ earlier that month and said it must be led by the U.S.
WASHINGTON’S FAULT: Beijing has been clear that it believes the world arrived at this point due to Washington’s interference in Kyiv. (SEE: DIRTY JOKE: ZELENSKY THE COMEDIAN.)
Shortly after the conflict started, Hua Chunying, the Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, said the invasion of Ukraine could have been avoided.
“China has taken a responsible attitude and persuaded all parties not to escalate tensions or incite war,” she said. “Those who follow the U.S.’s lead in fanning up the flame and then shifting the blame onto others are truly irresponsible.”
WHAT PUTIN SAID The Russian president said the ongoing economic global crisis was triggered by elites in the West “who would not, or even cannot, acknowledge objective facts” about changes in the world. He said they only see a “world order that benefits only them, forcing everyone to live under the rules, which they invented and which they regularly break and constantly change depending on the situation,” The Global Times reported.
The BBC noted that Putin accused some European countries of acting like colonialists. He said he would consider limiting grain donations to Turkey because “practically all the grain taken out of Ukraine is destined not for the poorest and developing countries, but for countries of the European Union.”
PRICE CAPS ALREADY A BUST? Putin vowed to halt all deliveries of gas, oil, diesel oil or coal if the European Union goes forward with putting price caps on Russian oil.
“An attempt to limit prices by administrative means is just ravings, it’s sheer nonsense. If they try to implement that dumb decision, it will entail nothing good for those who will make it,” The Associated Press reported.
Fortune magazine, citing the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, noted that Moscow pulled in $157 billion in “the past six months from fossil fuel exports—with EU nations importing 54% of this amount.”
In an interview with Dr. Joseph Mercola, Edward Dowd, a former equity portfolio manager for BlackRock, explained why he believes the global financial system will collapse within the next six to 24 months.
Edward Dowd is a hedge fund “guru” and former equity portfolio manager for the largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock. Over the past two years, Dowd has courageously come forward to awaken people to the collateral damage of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A global financial collapse is a mathematical certainty. Dowd predicts the collapse will begin in earnest within the next six to 24 months.
COVID-19 provided cover for central banks and governments, allowing them to temporarily hide the reality that the financial system is crashing.
COVID-19 also allowed for the erection of a control system to shield governments and central banks from the fallout of collapsing food, energy and finance systems. It allowed them to restrict travel and introduce digital IDs and central bank digital currencies by linking them together with vaccine passports.
Insurance companies report a 40% increase in excess mortality among working-age adults during the fourth quarter of 2021. Millennials aged 25 to 44 had an 84% increase in excess mortality in that same timeframe. Since the rollout of the COVID-19 jabs, the number of Americans who claim to be disabled has risen by at least 10%, possibly more.
In the video below, I interview Edward Dowd, a hedge fund “guru” and former equity portfolio manager for BlackRock, one of the two largest asset managers in the world, Vanguard being the other. Over the past two years, Dowd has courageously come forward to awaken people to the collateral damage of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For example, in early March 2022, Dowd shared mortality statistics on Steve Bannon’s War Room, showing Millennials aged 25 to 44 had an 84% increase in excess mortality during the fall of 2021.
An education in booms and busts
Dowd became interested in finance right out of college. He got a job with HSBC Holdings, the largest bank in Europe, as an institutional, fixed-income salesperson, selling bonds.
“That was a five-year education in what really happens in the capital markets,” he says, “and everything you learn in the textbooks is garbage … I learned about Wall Street, how it worked and how it was incentivized.”
Dowd continues:
“Back when I was a bond salesman from 1990 to ’95, there were a bunch of scandals. Wall Street is basically a boom and bust operation. There’s usually a boom created by the Federal Reserve that puts money into the system.
“They don’t control where their money goes and Wall Street takes advantage of that. And usually it ends in fraud
“The scandal in the early ’90s was the fraud with the mortgage-backed securities. There was a big Wall Street firm that went under because they had some trades in the drawer. Computer systems weren’t as robust, so some traders were hiding losses and that firm went belly up.
“Interestingly enough, BlackRock at the time helped fix that problem. They had computer systems [the Aladdin system] that helped analyze the mortgage-backed securities … it’s just risk management software basically.
“So, I learned the engines of Wall Street, but I wanted to get into the stock business. I went back to business school at Indiana University, graduated in ’97 and went to Wall Street to Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, where I was an electric utility analyst down the hall from the internet folks who were doing all the IPOs [initial public offerings].
“Basically, fraud on the IPOs was at every investment house, and it wasn’t hard fraud, it was soft fraud. They just were not doing the due diligence that the institutions used to do. Before they would IPO a company, they would make sure that the company had things like revenues, and in the late ‘90s that went by the wayside.
“So, a lot of firms without revenues and just ideas were IPO’d … Eventually the Fed [Federal Reserve] did what they do. They tightened interest rates, the bubble popped and a whole host of corporate fraud was exposed: WorldCom, Enron, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks.”
After that bust, the Federal Reserve went back to printing money and, in 2008, the real estate bubble burst, resulting in a massive recession.
I describe the forces at work — then, and now — in “Who Is Behind the Economic Collapse?” At the time of that economic collapse, Dowd was working for State Street Investment Research, which was bought up by BlackRock.
Asset managers and the global cabal
To many, BlackRock appears to play an important role in the globalist cabal’s effort to usher in The Great Reset. Dowd, having signed a non-disparagement agreement, is not free to discuss his views on BlackRock, but he can talk about similar players, such as Blackstone and Vanguard, the latter of which is a similarly sized institution.
Dowd says:
“I don’t believe they control these corporations [the companies they own shares in], but they have undo influence, which Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway has written about.
“Basically, because of the growth of passive ETFs [exchange-traded funds] the voting of those shares goes to the senior executives of the firm. And so, there is some influence at Vanguard over some of the board votes.
“Back in the day … most of the money inequities were managed by fundamental portfolio managers. I used to vote for the board but because we were so busy, we had like 80 companies in our portfolio, there was a firm called Institutional Shareholder Services, ISS, which would help us figure out the votes.
“It was a software system that would analyze all the proposals and then tell us how to vote accordingly. And, if we wanted to withhold a vote or change a vote, we would. So, there seems to be a concentration of power in the votes. The vote used to be more spread out over many, many different people.
“So, they don’t control [the companies they own]. Vanguard and BlackRock are agents. They manage other people’s money. But they do vote on some of the shareholder board proposals. So, they don’t get on the phone and call Bourla at Pfizer and say, ‘Do what we say.’ It’s more soft influence.
“But I do believe, as concentration of market share, Vanguard and BlackRock are the biggest passive investment asset management firms. Charlie Munger had a point that it’s too much decision-making in too few hands.
“Again, I don’t think they run the companies. But where there’s a concentration of power, there’s definitely things that can go awry and aren’t exactly above board, but I have no proof of that. It’s just when power’s concentrated bad things usually happen.”
Kicking the financial doomsday can down the road
Lately, I’ve written many articles discussing the coming financial collapse. Worldly signs all point in that direction, and according to Dowd, it’s a mathematical certainty.
The Federal Reserve system, which is a debt-based monetary system, was created in 1913, the same year the IRS and tax system were created. The system of creating money through debt is inherently fraudulent.
In the early days, banks would lend the debt and the debt would find its way into different areas of growth, which would then get overheated. Fraud occurred because money was too easy, but it was mostly free market fraud.
In the late ‘90s, corporate fraud took over and we had a 50% stock market correction. The Federal Reserve responded by turning on the money spigot: They lowered interest rates and the money found its way into the real estate market, which turned into an unsustainable bubble.
Real estate was being hypothecated through collateral debt obligations and mortgage-backed security. Wall Street levered up 20-to-1, 30-to-1 on their balance sheets to make money and thought the party would go on forever. But inevitably, the Fed started to raise interest rates and the whole thing collapsed.
According to Dowd, the problem with this bank fraud was that it was systemic in nature. The central banks had to step in and buy this fraudulent debt.
So, this fraud still remains today, on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, and on the balance sheets of countless other banks. In other words, the fraud didn’t go away. It was just baked in and hidden.
Financial collapse is a mathematical certainty
“Then, governments, because the economy collapsed globally, started spending like drunken sailors,” Dowd says. “The last 12 years have been a ballooning of what I call the central bank-government bubble, the sovereign debt bond bubble.”
Who’s going to save that bubble? Who’s going to be the buyer of all that debt when this bubble finally blows up? Answer: No one. Many who are aware of the situation are just surprised the system has lasted this long.
It looked like it was ready to burst in 2019, and then, conveniently, COVID-19 showed up, which granted emergency powers to all central banks. Governments went on another spending spree, printing money, and this allowed them to kick the proverbial can down the road for another two years.
Dowd says:
“Here we are in 2022 and it’s unraveling again. And the reason why COVID was important is because the Federal Reserve was able to plug the hole in what was beginning to become a liquidity debt crisis.
“They printed 65% more money. The money stock went up 65% year over year in 2020, and that was able to paper it over. Then, when the economy was shut down, it was an external shock, not in the internal shock, so when they reopened with all the money in the system, we had a recovery for a year and a half. Stock markets went crazy, credit markets went crazy, and we went back up again.
“But here we are two years later, [with] inflation caused by the bad policies of the Biden administration, the EU, the money growth … also, COVID broke a lot of supply chains … Basically, we hadn’t had inflation in goods and services for the last 12 years. We had inflation in assets, stocks and bonds.
“What’s going on now is the real economy is feeling the effects of the inflation, the bad policies. We’re starting to see the U.S. dollar go up, and the dollar is a reserve currency of the world. Over the last 22 years, there’s been a tremendous growth in what’s called dollar-denominated debt … We have about $15 trillion in dollar-denominated debt.
“So, when you see the dollar going up, that’s indicative of a debt crisis because money’s becoming tight. There are fewer dollars out there. People are scrambling for dollars. And the reason why I think we’re imminently going to collapse is we’ve never seen a commodity inflation cycle with the dollar going up at the same time …
“You can make the case that it’s intentional because the policies are so bad that they’re shutting down energy production. Before the Ukraine War, Biden’s first executive order on Day 1 of his administration was to shut down the Keystone pipeline. So, here we are. I think we’re at the end.
“COVID provided cover for the central banks and the governments, but it also allowed for a control system. If everything’s going to collapse, wouldn’t it be nice to have a control system where travel is restricted, you can blame it on a virus, you create vaccine passports, which then get linked to digital IDs, and then central bank digital currency. So, I think COVID was a convenient excuse.
“As we roll through time, I’m starting to think this was a plan. I don’t have evidence, but the fact that we’re not stopping what’s going on suggests to me that it’s a conspiracy of interests, and they don’t want to stop the rollout of these vaccines.
“And the longer this goes on, the more convinced I become that COVID may have been a plan. I used to say it was a convenient excuse, but the longer this goes on, the more ridiculous this becomes. So, I think there was ill intent.”
A question of when
Dowd believes the initial financial collapse will occur within the next six to 18 months, or at most 24 months. If stock markets become seriously unhinged and we start getting declines of more than 40% in the indices, the Federal Reserve may start buying stocks outright, which will result in a neo-feudalism system that will only magnify already existing discrepancies between the have and the have not’s.
The reason for that, Dowd explains, is because:
“There’s no market mechanism to punish anybody for making bad decisions. Their bad decisions are bailed out by the central banks. The moral hazard is so high that if you just are a C-suite executive at a major Fortune 500 company, you’re going to become phenomenally wealthy and not have to really be good. You’re going to be one of the lords and the workers and everybody else are going to be struggling to make ends meet.
“That’s what’s been going on for the last 12 years. The economy for the most part has been an economy of the big and those close to the printing machine … If you’re trying to actually create a small business, if you’re a worker at one of these corporations and you don’t get a lot of stock options, you’re not getting ahead.”
Why Dowd started speaking out about the COVID jab
Dowd, who lives in Maui, first got involved in the anti-jab fight when the mandates were rolled out. In Maui, you had to have a vaccine passport just to enter a restaurant or gym.
He says:
“I was suspicious of the jab from the get-go because I knew two things: Operation Warp-anything sounds like a disaster. Seriously. And No. 2, it was experimental, and I knew that most vaccines took seven to 10 years of safety data to be vetted before they were put into people’s arms.
“So, I just thought everybody would be like me — rational — and not take it. Then, when I saw the propaganda machine, the social pressure, I knew something else was afoot, that something was going on, and that’s when I got super involved. I started going to rallies on Maui. I started meeting like-minded people and that’s how I got hooked up with Dr. [Robert] Malone here on Maui.
“Now I’m part of the crew that’s trying to expose this crime. When I met [Malone] in October of 2021, I told him I had a suspicion there were lots of bad things going on with the vaccines … I said I would be monitoring the insurance companies and the funeral home companies, and if my thesis was correct, they’d show up in those results — and sure enough, they did.”
The choice to focus on nongovernment databases was prescient, as the CDC in recent months has started compromising mortality statistics. They’re supposedly upgrading servers and reloading all-cause mortality data, and now tens of thousands of death reports are missing.
All-Cause mortality is a crucial endpoint for any drug
“I was using the fraud word pretty liberally in the fall of 2021 in regards to Pfizer,” Dowd says, and as soon as he saw that the FDA wanted to hide Pfizer’s data for 75 years, he was utterly convinced. “That’s prima fascia evidence of cover-up,” he says.
Now, as those documents are starting to pour out, at a pace of 55,000 pages per month, we’re coming to realize what the FDA and Pfizer were so eager to hide.
Dowd continues:
“The all-cause mortality endpoint, this is something we need to talk about. Normally, if you’re a single product biotech company and you do a clinical trial that fails the all-cause mortality endpoint, the drug does not get approved [by the FDA].
“At the end of the day, if the risk is higher than the benefit, this thing doesn’t get approved. The all-cause mortality endpoint for the Pfizer vaccine, when they touted its effectiveness, they conveniently hid that data point from everybody. It came out in the FOIA request in the fall and, again, the trial was only 28 days.
“This is also just unprecedented. So, in 28 days, there was something like 23 deaths in the vaccine group and 17 in the placebo group, which gives all-cause mortality excess of 23%. It should not have been approved on that alone. That’s fraud in my humble opinion.”
As noted by Dowd, one of the most remarkable counterarguments to come out of a fraud litigation case against Pfizer in recent months is Pfizer’s attorneys claiming that even if there is fraud, Pfizer cannot be prosecuted because the government knew about it.
“Why is this not the biggest headline in the mainstream media?” Dowd asks. “Only those of us in the echo chamber that are on top of this issue seem to know this.”
In the real world, the all-cause excess mortality demonstrated in Pfizer’s trial is turning out to be on the money. The U.K., for example, has seen excess mortality rise between 10% and 20% since the shots rolled out.
In other areas, and/or in certain age categories, excess mortality is far greater, yet the FDA and CDC are just going along with it, doing absolutely nothing to warn anyone of the risks.
Shocking increases in excess mortality
As noted by Dowd, insurance companies were reporting a 40% increase in excess mortality among working-age adults during the fall of 2021. A 10% all-cause mortality rise is a once in a 200-year catastrophe, so 40% is just off the charts.
Before the CDC started manipulating its death statistics, that too showed all-cause mortality was up by about 40%, Dowd says. The smoking gun in the CDC data was found when excess mortality was broken down by age group.
Millennials, those between the ages of 25 and 44, had a whopping 84% increase in excess mortality during the fall of 2021.
Dowd says:
“They try to explain it away by saying, well, lockdowns cause deaths of despair, suicides, drugs and alcohol, and people missing their cancer screenings.
“Well, in a three-month timeframe, we went from 40% to 50% excess mortality in the summer, to 84% excess mortality into the fall for the millennial age group, which represented about 61,000 people between March of ’21 and February of ’22.
“Sixty-one thousand excessive deaths represents a Vietnam War in one year for that age group. That’s what occurred. And look, these are ages 25 to 44. You shouldn’t be dying at that age unless it’s accidental or self-induced via suicide or drug abuse.
“And you can’t tell me that everyone decided, in a three-month timeframe, to commit suicide and overdose on drugs. Makes no sense.”
There was also a huge shift in deaths during 2021 from the old to the young, with younger people now dying at an alarming rate.
“At this point, we have evidence of the crime,” Dowd says. “What I’m shocked at is the fact that the mainstream media are still blacking this out. The good news is there seems to be word of mouth, and more and more people, because the vaccine doesn’t work, aren’t getting boosters.”
Massive increase in disabilities
According to Dowd, insurance companies are also reporting increases in disability payments for the first quarter of 2022, and both insurance companies and funeral homes are also seeing a continued rise in excess mortality.
He continues:
“In the second quarter, insurance companies are playing games right now where they’re releasing reserves, they’re increasing pricing, so, it doesn’t look as bad, but it’s still not good.
“The funeral home companies are still seeing growth above what they thought they’d be seeing. They thought they’d be returning to trend line and they’re still getting year-over-year growth. You got to remember their year-over-year growth is versus 2021.
“So, they shouldn’t be growing. And these are same-store sales, not via acquisitions. So, these are same-store sale comparables year over year. And both funeral home companies that I looked at for Q2 grew same-store sales between 2% and 3%, which is comparable to Q2 of 2021. It should be collapsing 20%, 30%, and it’s not.
“Let’s talk about the disability data. This is super important. I think we’re going to find — as tragic as the worst adverse event, death, is — there are some things worse than death; life-altering disabilities that make your life unlivable, and those who live with you have to take care of you.
“And the impacts to society are way worse than a sudden death … My partner, who was an ex-Wall Street insurance analyst, discovered a Federal database, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the good news about them is they don’t have any skin in this game.
“They do a household survey every month. Every month we get the employment numbers that comes from them, and they do a bunch of different questions, some of which are in regards to disability, which essentially come down to ‘Are you disabled and/or is anybody in your household disabled of working age?’
“For the five years prior to 2021, that number was between 29 million and 30 million. It’s now 33 million and growing significantly since 2021. And it really started to take off in May, June of 2021.
“I had some Ph.D. physicists who’ve done some statistical analyses, and they’re saying that it’s almost a four-standard deviation above the norm, and the slope of it, the rate of change, is alarming.
“We’ve increased the disabled by 10%. Now, this has nothing to do with disability claims. This is self-identification. This is not tied to a doctor’s note or getting on disability. This is just someone saying, voluntarily, that they’re disabled …
“So, the number of disabled could be way, way more. We’re just scratching the surface here. But the signal is the change, the rate of change, the standard deviation above the norm, which is four. Three standard deviations is crazy.
“Four is like, ‘WOW!’ So, this is what’s going on. If you ask yourself, why is there a labor shortage? I think this explains a lot.
“And you multiply this globally, and they talk about supply chains and inability to hire people — this is definitely going on. I also think a large part of the inflation we’re seeing is due to people not able to work.”
Silver linings
If there’s a silver lining to this mess, it’s that parents are waking up to the dangers of not just the COVID-19 jab but also the childhood vaccination schedule as a whole. As of early August 2022, only 3% of children under age 5 had received the COVID-19 jab. Many are also taking a second look at other vaccines, including adult vaccines.
This is long overdue, as none of the vaccines on the childhood vaccination schedule has ever been compared to a true placebo to confirm safety and effectiveness, and no studies have been done to confirm that giving multiple vaccines simultaneously is actually safe.
“I think as this scandal collapses and unfolds, it’s going to remake a lot of our institutions,” Dowd says, “and I think that’s a good thing. I think people like yourself and others who’ve been out in the wilderness are going to be vindicated. I’ll never take another vaccine again, or a flu shot. I’m done. I’m out.”
Are you prepared?
With regard to what you can do to prepare for the inevitable financial crash, Dowd says:
“People ask me for investment advice. I’m loathe to give it, but I will say this: If financial assets are going to collapse, don’t worry about inflation. It’s probably a good idea to have some of your portfolio … in cash, to take advantage of the blood-in-the-streets scenario that’s coming.
“So that, when everyone’s selling, you’re doing what JP Morgan of old did — you’re buying. That’s not a bad idea.”
Aside from protecting your financial assets, you’d be wise to prepare for other related scenarios as well, such as food, water and energy shortages. Shore up supplies and figure out how to live in an “off-grid” scenario, in case daily conveniences suddenly vanish.
Also prepare yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually for what could be stressful and challenging times as the globalist cabal continues to push The Great Reset forward, which will require more “emergencies.”
Dowd says:
“We got the midterms coming up. The people in power are deathly afraid because crimes have been committed, so I suspect shenanigans. They’re trying to get monkeypox going. That doesn’t seem to be capturing the imagination of the people.
“They may try, I suspect, good old-fashioned war. War usually takes care of a lot of problems.
“The thing we need to worry about is China. China has a demographic problem. They’re in a demographic decline that started in 2020 … In the ’80s and ’90s, everyone said Japan was going to overtake the U.S. Well, Japan had a demographic bust.
“They collapsed and they’ve lost two decades. China is just hitting that now. Larry Fink’s a good businessman, but he is going into China at exactly the wrong time. China is done in my humble opinion. It’s a contrarian viewpoint, but it’s backed by data …
“They’re over-indebted and they’re literally imploding as we speak. A lot of these COVID lockdowns you see in the last couple months are nothing more than covering up bank runs. One of their biggest fears … is their own population.
“As long as they kept people fed and getting jobs, they didn’t have to worry. If there’s an economic collapse, what traditionally most countries do is they create an outside demon that unites everybody.
“If I’m China, and I’m running the show and I’m an evil person, I would start something with Taiwan just to get everybody focused outside of the internal issues in China.”
To put this in perspective, if you were able to create a stack of one trillion dollar bills it would be 67,866 miles high.
So a stack of 1.5 trillion dollars would be over 100,000 miles high.
We often use the phrase “a mountain of money” rather flippantly, but this really would be a colossal mountain of money.
This thing in Europe is rapidly becoming rather serious. Vladimir Putin’s decision to end the flow of gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline has caused an enormous derivatives crisis to erupt in Europe, and it is going to take a giant mountain of money to fix it. Some are already referring to this as a “Lehman Brothers moment” for the European financial system, and authorities all over the EU are really starting to freak out. We haven’t seen anything like this since 2008, and if the Europeans are not able to contain the damage we could soon see a tsunami of financial panic sweep across the entire globe.
European energy trading is being strained by margin calls of at least $1.5 trillion, putting pressure on governments to provide more liquidity buffers, according to Norway’s Equinor ASA.
Aside from fanning inflation, the biggest energy crisis in decades is sucking up capital to guarantee trades amid wild price swings. That’s pushing European Union officials to intervene to prevent energy markets from stalling, while governments across the region are stepping in to backstop struggling utilities. Finland has warned of a “Lehman Brothers” moment, with power companies facing sudden cash shortages.
We aren’t talking about 1.5 million dollars.
We aren’t even talking about 1.5 billion dollars.
1.5 trillion dollars is a colossal amount of cash.
To put this in perspective, if you were able to create a stack of one trillion dollar bills it would be 67,866 miles high.
So a stack of 1.5 trillion dollars would be over 100,000 miles high.
We often use the phrase “a mountain of money” rather flippantly, but this really would be a colossal mountain of money.
The problem is not with the physical markets. Rather, we are being told that 1.5 trillion dollars in “liquidity support” will be needed because derivatives trading has gone completely haywire…
“Liquidity support is going to be needed,” Helge Haugane, Equinor’s senior vice president for gas and power, said in an interview. The issue is focused on derivatives trading, while the physical market is functioning, he said, adding that the energy company’s estimate for $1.5 trillion to prop up so-called paper trading is “conservative.”
1.5 trillion dollars is the “conservative” estimate that we are being given right now.
That means that the final bill will likely be in the “trillions”.
Where is all of that money going to come from?
Over the years, I have done so many articles about the dangers of derivatives.
Is the inevitable global derivatives meltdown finally upon us?
The European Commission is also examining measures to help with liquidity. These could include credit lines from the European Central Bank, new products as margin collateral, and temporary suspensions of derivatives markets, according to a policy background paper seen by Bloomberg News.
If they actually decided to temporarily suspend the trading of derivatives, that would actually create even more panic.
This entire crisis could be solved if the war in Ukraine ends and Russian gas starts flowing back into Europe.
But that isn’t going to happen. Neither side is going to back down, and there will not be peace any time soon.
And so this is going to be a very bitter and very cold winter for Europeans, and the Russians are openly taunting them…
Russia’s state-controlled energy giant Gazprom has taunted Europe with a sinister video warning about a long winter with snow and ice sweeping across the continent.
The two-minute clip titled Winter will be Long shows how Europe will freeze amid the exorbitant energy prices caused by Vladimir Putin’s savage invasion of Ukraine.
The footage shows a worker turning off the supplies, sending the gas pressure needle to zero, as icy clouds ominously creep across the screen, interspersed with aerial shots of Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London.
This winter, we are likely to see shortages, mandatory rationing and insanely high energy bills all over Europe.
According to Zero Hedge, it is now being projected that energy bills in Europe will increase by a total of 2 trillion euros and will ultimately reach 20 percent of all disposable income.
Needless to say, we are now in unprecedented territory.
We have already started to see absolutely massive protests in major European cities, and Italian politician Matteo Salvini is openly admitting that this crisis has brought Europeans to “their knees”…
On Sunday Salvini urged an end to Russia energy sanctions which are only leaving Europeans “on their knees” due to higher energy bills and lack of supply. “Several months have passed and people are paying two, three, even four times more for their bills,” he said in an interview RTL radio. “And after seven months, the war continues and Russian Federation coffers are filling with money.”
He explained that not only are the sanctions not working, but they hit Italy harder. While saying he stands in solidarity with Ukraine, he’s not willing to stick with something obviously counterproductive where the blowback is felt more in Europe, Italy in particular with its soaring energy import prices, and not the intended target of the Putin government.
The longer the gas stays off, the worse things are going to get.
So what happens if the Russians never turn the gas back on?
The second-largest steel producer in the world, ArcelorMittal, is the most recent business name to announce the closure of a factory in Europe as a result of rising gas and energy costs.
Due to the outrageously high surge in energy prices, ArcelorMittal is shutting down one of the two existing blast furnaces at its steelworks plant in Bremen of Germany, starting by the end of September until any further updates.
Many have warned that Europe is plunging into a “recession”, but the truth is that what the Europeans are facing is much more serious than that.
This is going to be bad.
And things are going to stay bad until there is peace with the Russians, and the truth is that peace with the Russians may not happen at all.
Months ago, western leaders were openly bragging that they were going to crush the Russian economy.
It turns out that Europe is the one being crushed instead.
Summer is almost over, winter is coming, and the Europeans are completely and utterly unprepared for what is coming next.
“They [Europeans] even believe that it is the bad Russians that have closed the tap of oil and gas, while it is our own leaders in Europe that have stupidly imposed these sanctions that are destroying the European economy. We, Europeans, are bringing stagflation onto our head. Before the people realize it, it will be too late. Macron, [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholz, von der Leyen and the like will never admit they were wrong and present excuses,” he asserted.
Charles Gave blasts leaders for “destroying the European economy.”
Predicting that cost of living protests in the Czech Republic and Germany will spread around the continent, a prominent economist warns that European citizens are “mad with anger and it will worsen.”
On Saturday, over 70,000 people took to the streets of Prague to demand an end to weapons supplies and neutrality regarding the conflict in Ukraine.
Numerous demonstrations are also set to take place in major German cities over the next month as energy bills and inflation soar as a result of sanctions on Russia and over dependence on green energy.
“The demonstrations in Prague and Germany are only the beginning. The price of gas and consequently of electricity are driving the European citizens mad with anger and it will worsen,” French economist Charles Gave told Sputnik.
Gave went on to assert that many Europeans aren’t buying the narrative that the situation, which culminated in the shut down of gas supplies to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, is all Vladimir Putin’s fault.
“The European governments and the European Commission speak of a ‘manipulation’ by Russia, but people perceive very well that the decision to stop importing Russian gas and oil was a European decision, taken by Brussels without even thinking of the impact it will have on the European economy,” he said.
The economist blasted European leaders for their obsession with net zero and climate change hysteria, which has left the continent totally lacking in self-sufficiency.
“For the last 15 years, our European leaders have gone into a climate craze, promoting magic mirrors and windmills as the solution. It does not work. These solutions demand the same capacity in gas power plants,” Gave said.
The economist firmly blamed globalist technocrat leaders for sacrificing the interests of Europeans on the altar of prolonging a war that will cause economic devastation.
“They [Europeans] even believe that it is the bad Russians that have closed the tap of oil and gas, while it is our own leaders in Europe that have stupidly imposed these sanctions that are destroying the European economy. We, Europeans, are bringing stagflation onto our head. Before the people realize it, it will be too late. Macron, [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholz, von der Leyen and the like will never admit they were wrong and present excuses,” he asserted.
As we highlighted yesterday, police in the UK are preparing for a widespread “breakdown in public order” caused by the cost of living crisis if new Prime Minister Liz Truss doesn’t authorize a big enough government handout.
Truss is set to freeze all energy bills for at least two years at a cost of hundreds of billions of pounds, an expense that will inevitably be passed on to the taxpayer at a later date.
The US economy could sink into a quagmire of shrinking output, surging inflation, and soaring unemployment, renowned economist and New York University professor Nouriel Roubini warned last week during an eToro webinar.
He argued that the Federal Reserve might have to double interest rates to 5% in order to curb inflation. However, such an increase could choke economic growth and cause a spike in joblessness, Roubini stressed. Moreover, raising rates could trigger a debt crisis.
The economist also cautioned that the US regulator’s moves to rein in inflation could tank the economy, and cause crashes across stocks, bonds, housing, credit, private equity, and other assets in bubble territory. However, if the central bank gives up on fighting inflation, price increases could spiral out of control.
Stubborn inflation and the coronavirus pandemic might force the Fed to drive the US economy into an even deeper recession than the one it has avoided, Roubini warned.
“I worry about a stagflationary debt crisis, because you have the worst of the ’70s in terms of supply shocks, and you have the worst of the global financial crisis because of too much debt, and that combination is dangerous,” he said.
“If you’re behind the curve, eventually the recession is going to be more severe, the loss of jobs and income and wages is going to be more severe,” the economist explained, referring to the Fed’s rate hikes relative to inflation. “You need to be ahead of the curve.”
Roubini came to prominence for predicting the financial crisis of 2008-09 and was dubbed ‘Doctor Doom’ by Wall Street.
Have you ever wondered why we just keep getting hit by one thing after another? I grew up during a time when it seemed like America was endlessly blessed, but now everything around us seems the opposite of blessed. Our economy is imploding, inflation is out of control, the housing market is starting to crash, our weather patterns have gone completely nuts, the western half of the nation is enduring the worst drought in 1,200 years, and we are dealing with three major pandemics simultaneously, we are losing our proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and it looks like war with China is just around the corner, and on top of everything else, our political system is failing because liberals and conservatives deeply, deeply hate one another. And if you think that there is hope on the horizon, you are going to be severely disappointed. The current crop of politicians in Washington is the worst that we have had in our entire history, and all of the “solutions” they give us just seem to make matters even worse.
It was authored by a prominent businessman named Sherwin Pomerantz, and it really got me thinking.
Could it be possible that there is a common thread that connects all of the bad things that are constantly happening to us?
In his article, one of the points that Pomerantz makes is that America’s political system is coming apart at the seams right in front of our eyes…
Politically, whether people want to admit it or not, the country is in the midst of a civil war, though for the moment, not one where both sides have taken up arms, one against the other (although that, too, could eventuate).
Sadly, he is right on target.
There is so much politically-motivated hatred in our country today. Liberals deeply hate conservatives and conservatives deeply hate liberals. It would seem that it is only a matter of time before the entire system shatters.
On another note, Pomerantz believes that it is no coincidence that our weather patterns have gone totally haywire and that our nation is being constantly hit by natural disaster after natural disaster…
Then there is the weather. On average, the US experiences fewer than 1,500 tornadoes a year. Through June, there have already been 940 reported tornadoes there, which means the country is on track to see 2,000 or more, a 33% increase year-on-year.
The nightly news out of the US for the past few months shows tens of millions of people under extreme weather risk every day, often in three different areas of the country simultaneously (upper Midwest, East coast and the Southeast region). In the west, a long period of drought has been drying up reservoirs and spawning massive forest fires. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) statistics show that as of July 5, 34,478 fires have already burned 4,582,301 acres. This is above the 10-year average of 27,346 fires, and twice the average of 2,026,917 acres burned. The odd thing is that very little of this occurs just north of the US in Canada, or just south in Mexico. It all seems to be centered in the US.
I did find it odd that Pomerantz only briefly mentioned the drought because it is actually a really big deal.
At this moment, the western half of the nation is in the midst of the worst multi-year megadrought that the region has experienced in 1,200 years, and this is having an absolutely devastating impact on agricultural production.
For example, we are now being warned that a very serious shortage of tomatoes could soon be coming…
As endless supply chain-related food shortages force people to adjust their grocery lists, another essential ingredient is becoming scarce. Along with avocados, cream cheese, chickpeas, and olive oil, the supply of tomatoes has started to dwindle. But this time it’s California’s catastrophic drought conditions denying farmers the water needed to grow the versatile vegetable that’s to blame. Due to the shortage, the price of byproducts like ketchup, salsa, and spaghetti sauce has started to surge.
Speaking about the tomato shortage, Head of the California Tomato Growers Association Mike Montana said the golden state desperately needs rain. “We are getting to a point where we don’t have inventory left to keep fulfilling the market demand,” he told Bloomberg News. California, which grows a quarter of the world’s tomatoes, is in the middle of a historic drought that has stoked massive wildfires while drying up reservoirs. It has also become a major threat to the agriculture industry.
When I was growing up, I never once imagined that there could ever be a shortage of tomatoes in this country.
But things have changed, and life in the U.S. will never again be like it was when I was a little boy.
Although to be honest I am having flashbacks to the 1970s with all of the inflation we are witnessing right now.
In fact, if the inflation rate was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would be higher than anything that we experienced during the Jimmy Carter era.
Over the past couple of years, our politicians in Washington have gone on the most dramatic borrowing and spending binge in human history and the “experts” at the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of fresh dollars into the financial system.
Of course that was going to cause inflation, and now we have a colossal mess on our hands.
Every time you get a paycheck you’re falling behind because of inflation. Your real wages, sixteen months in a row (now let me think, how long has the Biden Administration been around here – about 18 months). Every month since they’ve been here real wages are down.
Ok so you’re losing, your treadmill, you’re losing every day in your wages and now the little bit of equity you have in the world, the little bit of net worth you’ve got in the world, the bottom’s fallen out on that.
Ok. You are screwed. Let me be blunt. Let me do some Harvard Business School math for you – You’re screwed.
The Federal Reserve is recklessly hiking interest rates in a desperate attempt to battle inflation, but everyone knew that this would inevitably cause a housing crash.
And as I pointed out last week, a housing crash has already begun.
The plunge in home sales is just stunning. Sales of new single-family houses collapsed by 12.6% in July from the already beaten-down levels in June, and by nearly 30% from July last year, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 511,000 houses, the lowest since January 2016, and well below the lockdown lows, according to data from the Census Bureau today.
Sadly, this is just the beginning.
If the Fed keeps raising rates, things will get far worse.
Meanwhile, we find ourselves battling three major pandemics all at once.
Despite everything that our health authorities have done, COVID is still with us and will be with us for many years to come.
If that wasn’t bad enough, a bird flu pandemic has erupted this year which has resulted in tens of millions of our chickens and turkeys being wiped out.
On top of that, a new monkeypox outbreak continues to spread at an exponential rate all over the planet.
Is it just some sort of a bizarre coincidence that we are now facing three major pestilences simultaneously?
Of course, this article would not be complete unless I talked about the war.
We are now deeply involved in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and it is not going very well.
And if both sides continue to escalate matters, we could eventually find ourselves in a nuclear conflict with Russia which would have the potential to ultimately kill billions of people.
In addition, the warmongers in the Biden administration have also brought us to the brink of a war with China. More U.S. politicians keep flying over to Taiwan, and at some point, the Chinese are going to decide that they simply cannot take any more provocations.
Also, it is just a matter of time before Iran and Israel go to war. And once that happens, the U.S. will inevitably decide to intervene.
In this article, I have covered war, plagues, economic collapse, and natural disasters among other things.
Could it be possible that all of these things are happening at this specific moment in human history for a reason?
My hope is that this article will get people thinking.
All of human history has been building up to a grand crescendo, and we get to be here for it.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the population has no idea what is ahead, and so most of them are going to be absolutely blind-sided by the cataclysmic events that are rapidly coming our way.
Somehow, Mr. Putin’s Russia will be left to represent what remains of international rule-of-law while the Western democracies sink deeper into a morass of deranged despotism. Anyway, they are too busy conducting war against their own people to even pretend to assist their Ukrainian proxies.
What’s wrong with the world? Let me count the ways…
The Western gambit against Ukraine is a bust, a foolish miscalculation that was obvious from the start. All it accomplished was to reveal the pitiful dependence of our European allies on Russian oil and gas, leaving their economies good and truly scuppered without them.
The Russians will likely end up with control of the Black Sea and probably the Ukraine breadbasket as well. So now Europe will starve and freeze.
Did they really want to commit suicide like that? Do the populations of Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the rest just aim to roll into oblivion? Probably not. Rather, we are entering the season of upended governments.
Europe is suddenly a magnificent mess with governments falling like duckpins, industry shuttered from lack of fuel and citizens rising up against insane World Economic Forum (WEF) diktats to drastically reduce livestock and shut down farming — in effect declaring food production an unacceptable environmental hazard.
Cutting Your Own Throat
This, of course, after the governments of Euroland cut their own throats by self-sanctioning themselves out of Russian oil and natural gas.
It’s especially bizarre in Germany, the largest economy of the region, which had just this year conclusively realized and admitted that its “green energy” policy was a complete bust, forcing them to shut down major wind turbine installations and resort to producing electricity with coal.
Nice job, greenies. Your idiotic policies are forcing economies to turn to coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. Of course, the governments of Merkel, and then Olaf Scholz, have revealed themselves as the sheerest hypocritical idiots.
The globalist stooges implanted everywhere will probably be overthrown. I can envision a scenario where NATO and the Euro Union will dissolve in impotent ignominy, and the various countries involved will have to renegotiate their destinies, forgoing U.S. advice and coercion.
They might even become adversaries of the USA, not allies. Did you forget we fought two wars against Germany not so long ago? And all those countries have been fighting each other since the Bronze Age, too.
History’s a Prankster
It may seem unbelievable, but history never stops reminding us what a prankster it is. A strange and terrible inversion has occurred in this Fourth Turning.
Somehow, Mr. Putin’s Russia will be left to represent what remains of international rule-of-law while the Western democracies sink deeper into a morass of deranged despotism. Anyway, they are too busy conducting war against their own people to even pretend to assist their Ukrainian proxies.
We can’t forget that “Joe Biden” crammed nearly $60 billion into the Ukraine money-laundering machine since February, which will just spew hallucinated capital back out into increasingly disordered financial markets.
Look: The indexes are up worldwide this morning. Why? Because global business is so good? I don’t think so.
Meanwhile, there are reports of huge amounts of Western-supplied weapons turning up on the black market. Apparently, some Ukrainians are even selling these weapons to the Russians!
“An Epic Crackup Is Upon Us”
An epic crackup is upon us. Every place in the world is primed for a meltdown, and a few lands in the periphery are already sinking. Sri Lanka is broken and out of gas after being set up as a WEF low-carbon ecostate experiment.
Panama is in revolt over extreme government corruption, food scarcity, and the aftereffects of an especially severe two-year-long COVID lockdown that the rest of the world hardly heard about — perhaps because China has operational control over the vital Panama Canal and the CCP has operational control over the World Health Organization, which set up Panama as a lockdown lab project.
In the U.S., moving toward autumn, what we have to look forward to is the blatant desperation of the claque behind “Joe Biden.” Their propaganda machine will probably go all out on climate change and renewed COVID hysteria.
There are always heat waves in midsummer. CNN acts shocked that it’s over 100 degrees in Texas. Really? Ever seen that before?
Meanwhile, behind the news about emerging Omicron subvariants, the vaccine injuries and deaths mount and the CDC pretends not to notice. They are just lying as usual. You’re used to it. You pretend it’s to be expected. You’ve forgotten that it wasn’t always so. Soon, it will matter.
Help Is on the Way — A Few Years From Now
Meanwhile, the November midterm elections are only a few months away. Democrats are panicking they’re going to get smoked at the polls. Well, here’s a prediction: A new pandemic is declared in early October, complete with lockdowns, while Google partners with Facebook to roll out a new vote-by-phone app. They’ll say it’s all necessary “to save our democracy.”
By some miracle, then, the Democrats add 30 more seats to their House majority and five in the Senate. Then we enter the new frontier of the Green New Deal and Build Back Better. In other words, the USA heads towards complete collapse.
Speaking of “Joe Biden,” whose idea was it to send the wind-up doll president to Saudi Arabia? I can just imagine what went on in the chamber in private with “JB” and MBS (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman), virtual autocrat of the oil-soaked desert land. And wasn’t that fist pump just priceless?
What concessions did “Joe Biden” win from the Saudis? Saudi Arabia graciously agreed to bump up its oil production somewhere in the 2025–2027 time frame — a real triumph for U.S. diplomacy. Nice. Doesn’t really do much for us in the short term, does it?
People, Get Ready
And now the ground is even shifting under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as China’s extravagant matrix of city-building, mortgage debt and banking fraud rattle its financial system. What a surprise!
Potent as it has been in bribing politicians around the world, infiltrating governments and cultural institutions in every land, and getting the news media to do their bidding, the CCP is apparently losing its grip on the Chinese people, who are sick of being locked down, tracked and swindled.
The tanks are out. This is not the same movie as Tiananmen Square, 1989. This is the CCP bankruptcy, an epic event that will thunder through “the global south,” sending Africa into famine and chaos and South America into yet another rotation of elites.
Pretty soon, it’s going to be every country for itself in this main event of the fourth turning (aka the long emergency). Global unity is a mirage, along with all the preposterous narratives of a world government.
And in every country for itself, it’s going to be every community, every family, every person for itself until, emergently and painfully, everyday life can be reorganized from the ground up.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
