Sanctioning The World

Yesterday the Alex and Alexander at The Duran had an excellent discussion of what the latest sanctions mean. I’ve done a partial transcript to cover that part of the discussion. However, the rest of the video is also very worthwhile, as they get into the latest $50 billion European “loan” to Ukraine. The Duran guys have a lot of fun with that, as they get into who the winners are—crooked Ukrainian oligarchs and the usual suspects in the globalist West. The losers? Got a mirror? Here’s the link:

US sanctions China via Russia. EU agrees to cover $50B loan

The portion regarding the new sanctions is very much a big picture presentation. Alexander leads the discussion, as usual. He points out that these new sanctions feature the US Treasury Department basically asserting its prerogative to sanction pretty much anyone they want to sanction. Without requiring an executive order from the POTUS. In other words, it’s another Deep State power grab. They also get into Trump’s tariff proposal, seeing in it a cynical ploy rather than an idealistic return to constitutional origins.

Finally, they note the cluelessness of it all, coming—as it does—at a time when the Anglo-Zionist empire is losing much of its global leverage, due to the movement of de-dollarization. In fact, there is almost certain to be a major boomerang effect, with sanctions undercutting the system (the King Dollar reserve currency system) it relies upon. It all comes down to the Anglo-Zionist empire attempting to assert its rule over the rest of the world—just because. Moral superiority doesn’t enter into it—that’s just the cover story. The war on Russia—which is envisioned as the leadup to the climactic war for world domination against China—is turning into a desperate toss of the coin. Heads—we win, King Dollar remains supreme, we force Russian and China into perpetual servitude. Tails—the Anglo-Zionist empire collapses in financial and military turmoil.

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All right, Alexander, let's talk about the latest sanctions against Russia--which are really US sanctions against China. It won't be affecting Russia too much--I think they've kind of shrugged it off already within 24 hours. China was very angry about these sanctions because obviously China understands that the real purpose of these sanctions is mostly directed towards China. Yellen seems to have some sort of beef with China. I don't know if it's personal or what's going on there, but Yellen is is definitely taking the lead in going after China.

I think an incredibly important line has now been crossed. I don't think people understand this very well at all, but let's just unpack it. Let's deal first of all with the least important part of the story, the one that's attracting most attention in the international media but which, in my opinion, is not remotely the most important part of the story.

First of all, the United States has sanctioned the Moscow Stock Exchange and its financial exchange desk. Now Russia is very unusual--was very unusual-- in that the way in which the banks exchanged money in Russia was done through a central registry operated by the Moscow Stock Exchange. There's a historic reason for this, which is that back in the '90s and for the 2000s right up in effect to the 2008 crisis Russia effectively had two stock exchanges--one was completely in dollars and euros and the other was in rubles.

Those two stock exchanges have been merged but there were certain structures that were carried over from that previous time, and one of them was, as I said, that there was this foreign exchange desk which is where the Russian banks made their transfers.

Now, that is not how transfers happen in most of the world. Most of the world banks that want to exchange money in transfer currencies do it directly with each other. Anyway, the US has now sanctioned that. The Russians have therefore announced that from now on the Moscow exchange will no longer make transfers in dollars and euros. Russian banks and other financial institutions could in theory do directly from with [sic?] other Western Banks but the reality is that the Russians for some time now have been pulling out of the dollar and euro trade. It represents only a small part of that trade and their policy anyway is to divest themselves of it. So it might for a short time make it more difficult for Russian exporters to receive payments for their exports in USD or Euros, but as they're transferring to trade in various other national currencies this is going to be more a short-term problem than a long-term problem. The Russians have already prepared for this for a very very long time. This is a blip. It's not going to have the dramatic effects that many people assume.

The far bigger story is the fact that the United States is now saying that, because as far as it is concerned Russia today is a war economy, any transaction of any sort with any Russian economic entity assists Russia conduct its war in Ukraine. That means that the United States is now authorized to sanction it. Now this is a roundabout way of using secondary sanctions to sanction Chinese Banks. If you remember a couple of weeks ago Blinken was saying that the United States was going to start moving towards sanctioning Chinese Banks. He went to Beijing and he uttered all of the same threats all over again. Now we see that it's going to start to happen.

Now, if we take these sanctions at face value, any Chinese bank that conducts transactions with any Russian commercial entity now risks being sanctioned. But of course the United States is the sole judge of which Chinese bank is doing what, and they now have the tool to sanction any and every Chinese bank if they wish to do it. What this means is that for the first time the United States is empowering itself to use secondary sanctions to sanction the financial services industry and, indeed, any part of the economy of another country. The Treasury can do this by itself without needing an executive order from the president, so what you see is,

• firstly, preparation for an economic war to be waged against China and,

• secondly, the Treasury Department usurping authority that properly speaking ought to belong to the president of the United States.

So let us say Donald Trump becomes president in November and wants to change policy towards China. He wants to avoid having sanctions on China. The Treasury Department can in theory simply disregard any decision he makes and he can only reverse those secondary sanctions if he decides to set aside the executive orders of imposing sanctions on Russia, which politically might be extremely difficult to do. So this is huge. In theory, of course, the President appoints the Secretary of the Treasury. But you could start to see the way things are happening in the United States. The president's powers are gradually being taken away from him and are becoming concentrated in more and more parts of the bureaucracy, and the United States is cranking up now for an outright war against China and its entire economic and financial system. They couldn't sanction China directly so they did this roundabout way.

And China's response is incredibly strong. The Chinese understand exactly what's going on and they made some very strong statements. Tthe Chinese foreign ministry spokesman has spoken out against it. There is a withering article about this in the Global Times, talking about the G7 and what it's doing and the Chinese have obviously figured this out completely and they understand what the Americans are about. Two years ago when the US imposed its first sanctions against some Chinese officials we said that the US had now climbed onto its sanctions escalator with respect to China, and the point would eventually come when China would be fully sanctioned. And we've just gone up a huge number of steps up the escalator, as predicted.

The pressure is coming from all directions in the United States. Apparently there's a plan being floated which is being associated with Donald Trump, and which many people in Congress on the Republican libertarian side are very excited about, which is do away with the income tax and the government raises all its money through tariffs. Now that sounds very attractive to many people and, on the face of it would return the United States to something closer to what the Founders probably envisaged back in the 1790s. The problem with doing that, of course, is that if you raise tariffs to those kind of levels, move over to a complete protectionist system at the same time as you're ending the income tax, you're going to have a shortage of goods and you're going to have a massive inflation inside the United States. So what this is really all about again is increasing tariffs on Chinese goods. It's been packaged once again to make it look like it's part of a plan within a Libertarian economic philosophy, but the way it's going to play out--and the way it's intended to play out, and the people who are advising Donald Trump understand this perfectly well--is about creating a massive tariff barrier against imports from China. This is what we're heading towards. You're going to get the tariffs, but you're not going to get the end of the income tax. I mean, that isn't going to happen.

This is also about giving more power to the Permanent State, using Donald Trump as an excuse. The fear of Trump is a really good excuse to shift more power to the Permanent State. Trump is four years. He's not going to have another term. Four years after that, though, the power is going to stay [with the Permanent State]. The power is going to stay and, as I said, we now see how the mechanism for imposing secondary sanctions is now being expanded to such a degree that control of the sanctions weapon is slipping out of the hands of America's elected government--the president and, indeed, Congress--and is passing to the bureaucracy, to the Treasury Department in this case, and to the other parts of the American bureaucracy.

It is an absolute disaster. The president in the United States is being shorn every year now of more and more of his power. People are talking about the imperial presidency. That might have been true in Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's day, but it's no longer the true to any real extent any longer. The presidency is just becoming decoration, as is Congress. The power is elsewhere. It is with the permanent government of the United States, the appointed officials and the bureaucracy and the other people who work with them.

Yeah, the the whole dictator thing, 'Trump is going to be a dictator, he's not going to want to leave!' that's a ruse. The the real plan is to concentrate more power in the Permanent State. That's why Biden is such a popular president amongst the Permanent State, because he's not really doing anything. He's just there to rubber stamp whatever needs to be rubber stamped, if he even understands what's going on. We don't even know if he understands what he's signing, or what he's saying okay to. That's why they like Biden as president. They can concentrate more and more power, shift more and more power into the Permanent State.

This is a common trick--they do it all the time--but what do these sanctions actually accomplish? Because the only thing that I see these sanctions doing is diminishing and destroying the US dollar, which is the foundation of the Permanent State's power. They don't see that that is one of the fundamental problems in having a bureaucracy run things. The problem with bureaucracies is that they never think strategically. That is why you need someone like the president and his team to be ultimately in control, able to get advice from all kinds of people and make the decisions--that is the role of the president, according to the way that the founders intended. The effect of all of these sanctions is it's going to undermine the US dollar system, which has been increasingly threatened, but people within the bureaucracies aren't really thinking about that. They have a war, as they see it, to fight against China--an economic war and ultimately a military one as well. And as far as they're concerned they're now carrying out that policy. That's their objective, to push the Chinese back economically by wrecking their financial system, imposing massive tariffs on Chinese goods.

There is, I suspect, some kind of inner belief that the United States will come out okay from this and that ultimately it will play out to the US's advantage, because it always has before. This is, I suspect, what people think about when they do these things. But bureaucracies are not good places for debates to take place. They probably don't take seriously these attempts by the BRICS to set up alternative systems. They assume that [BRICS is] going to fail because they say to themselve, the USD is so convenient, so easy to use. [The BRICS threat to King Dollar as the world reserve currency is] not going to stop them preparing for the major conflict with China that is now on the horizon, even though most people are not sticking with the USD. People are leaving.

From that point they continue, discussing the ways in which sanctions are actually assisting Russia’s economic development, its transition from a mere exporter of natural resources to an economic powerhouse and manufacturer of finished goods. The sanctions also are driving three key economies—those of Russia, China, and India—together into a global alliance that is drawing in most of the non-Western world. The Neo-colonialist neoliberal venture, the Anglo-Zionist empire leading the EU, is coming to an end.