Talking About War--Monetary, Political, Real
With Emphasis On What's To Come
Yesterday I listened to a video discussion featuring Tom Luongo and Alexander Mercouris. As usual it was stimulating, provocative, controversial in parts, and informative. It lasted for an hour and a half, so I can’t offer a transcript, but I did take notes. It seems to me that these notes may offer considerable food for thought. While the current situation comes under discussion, there is also a considerable emphasis on the shape of things to come. See what you think:
TWITTER WAR! GOLD WAR! RUSSIA VS THE WEST! WITH TOM LUONGO + ALEXANDER MERCOURIS - PART 1 OF 2
The biggest single story of the last two months is that the ruble is stable. The West was out to destroy the Russian financial system, but to the horror of the globalists that hasn't happened. Zhou started the fires of inflation as soon as he got in the White House, and now sanctions are fanning those fires strongly. Meanwhile hard currency is flooding into Russia.
The EU, Davos and the US are going to destroy themselves in order to try to destroy Russia. Their sanctions will tank their own economies even further--resulting in global collapse. Russia will need to look for investment capital from the rest of the world, but that should happen because of Russia’s exceptionally strong balance sheet. The West think they can get out of the collapse by defaulting on all their debt. There will be up to a year of restructuring the oil trade, which the West will try to break.
Russia is finally starting to break out of liberal-IMF economic orthodoxy. That thinking still dominates at the Russian Central Bank, but it’s now being challenged.
The economic hit in Europe should be much worse than in the US, yet the sanction craze is as hysterical as the Covid regime measures. But the people behind it know exactly what they're doing. How else to explain Union Pacific limiting fertilizer shipments just as planting season is approaching? But the globalists are drunk, euphoric with what they were planning to do at the Munich Security Conference--they're driving the world off a cliff and laughing as they do it.
As soon as Russia invaded it was going to end up as a financial war and a race for: Whose Great Reset? The Great Reset of Russia/China that will split the world in two, or the WEF's Great Reset--we're gonna destroy humanity in order to rebuild it?
Elon Musk has pulled something similar to what Trump did. Musk has already won, in that Trumpian sense, because he has forced the powers behind Twitter and the rest of social media and big tech to reveal who they really are and what they're really about. Just as with Trump--we always knew the establishment was corrupt, but it took Trump to truly force them to pull their masks off.
What's really scary is that it only takes about 3% of the population to radically change a society overnight. Hard core progs in the US are about 10%--they could do a Russia 1917, and they have the government's guns behind them. Nothing they would do would be stable, but it could be unbelievably destructive.
France? Hard core progs are 20-30% with a massive Deep State. Le Pen can't take that on--10x worse than Trump faced. Will this be the last president under the 5th Republic? Will the US break up? France is ripe for some sort of revolution. The French simply don't have the reverence for their political system and institutions, as in US or the UK. The political fissures is France are much deeper than almost anywhere in the West. There are massive tensions in French society that go all the way back to the Revolution. Anger at the system in France is deep--it's a powder keg. Things could get very ugly. The more Davos and its lackies try to hold it back, the worse it could be. Davos is trying to figure out how to somehow hang on to power.
Russians see this war with the West as an existential struggle, and the West isn't close to that mentality—not at the popular level. Russia has been radicalized. They see this conflict against the West's attempt to destroy Russia as a second Great Patriotic War. They're greatest fear now is that remaining Euro friendly people in the Kremlin could end up doing a compromise deal. The Russian people now want to fight this to the end.
The easiest way to beat Davos now is to wait them out--the math is obvious. This is an economic war of attrition. The Russian attitude is: We're absolutely ready to see this through. We've got food, fuel, machinery, technology. Missiles are cheap--the Russians specialize in missiles and they deny airspace (the Russian S-400 shootdown of two UA helicopters recently was actually very impressive--the range was up to 50k, over the horizon, helos were flying low). The one thing the US can't afford is puncturing its image of military invulnerability. The US no longer has the best ships, planes, missiles, infantry. Our advantage is in logistics and combined theater operations--we're really good at that stuff. But not necessarily the technology, and especially with missiles. There is no defense against hypersonic missiles, and the US doesn't have them yet.
During the first two weeks there was a sense of shock in Russia, but the West came to Putin's rescue with sanctions and the wave of anti-Russian hysteria. Then even the most liberal Russians realized they were facing irrational hatred. They see "Atlanticist" Russians as soft and weak. Very interesting to see crowds cheering Russian troops on--and waving red flags in addition to the Russian flag. They see Russia fighting for its life, just like WW2, and the red flag is the flag of the Great Patriotic War. History doesn't just vanish. Enlistment to the military is overwhelming.
People in the West who are pushing this war are doing so for their personal gain and personal sense of loss--corruption, biolabs, gas deals, or ideology. They're totally gone in self righteousness (but virtue signaling doesn't work in a real war). They've been in charge of the West for so long that they believe their own BS. It's become a religious cult. But they can't rally public support the way it's happening in Russia.
Everything about the power change in Pakistan looks like it was run out of the US Embassy. Imran Khan is popular, a cricketer, an unblemished reputation for honesty, and united many different sectors of Pakistani society, including religious. He was a powerful advocate of getting past being the anti-India. US and Pakistani military didn't like him. Once Khan wanted to stay out of the Russia - Ukraine conflict, that was it. But there seems to be a fracturing of the Pakistani Deep State, because all of this is driven by money. Saudi funders of the Pakistani Deep State are no longer in lock step with the US, and the Chinese have bought a lot of Pakistanis. US bought 6 months before Pakistan explodes again. That's the story in the West--Davos and the US globalists buying time, but the costs multiply when the geopolitical calculus changes.
TWITTER WAR! GOLD WAR! RUSSIA VS THE WEST! WITH ALEXANDER MERCOURIS + TOM LUONGO - PART 2 OF 2
We're seeing incredibly friendly calls--both ways--between Russia and the Saudis, at the same time that the Saudis are refusing to take calls from Washington. Things, alliances, are changing. If the Saudis proclaim independence from the US, they'll need security guarantees from Russia.
The attack on the Moskva--what was that about? This was done to get the Russians to react emotionally, but they refuse to do that--just as they refused to react to a "clear British provocation" in Syria, the shootdown of IL-20 with a French missile. It looks like another Brit provocation to cause WW3, and just as the US military and the Russians didn't take the bait in Syria, it's not happening with the Moskva.
This is a war of the political class and financial oligarchs. Yes, there are people in the Pentagon who want war, but the Russians are giving cooler heads in the Pentagon every opportunity to stop the drive for war. (I've pointed out repeatedly that, in contrast with the UK, the Pentagon has tended to downplay the most provocative propaganda ploys--Bucha, Moskva, etc.). Russians generally believe Brits were behind the Moskva attack. But the Pentagon refuses to bite, remains ambiguous--American and Russian militaries are trying to downplay this. The crazies are mostly in MI6, just as in previous incidents. Now the Brits are publicly featuring SAS on the ground training in Ukraine.
Readout from Russia on Saudi call--Saudis (MBS) initiated the call to Putin to discuss issues of bilateral cooperation in trade and the economy, and commitment to closer mutually beneficial ties. Saudis spoke highly of cooperation of Russia in OPEC and assuring the stability of the global oil market. The Ukraine and Yemen situations were also discussed. Boils down to two words directed at Zhou regime: FU. And MBS won't take Zhou's calls. FYI: Nobody in Saudi will go without bread, there will be copper to build ACs, etc.
The old system built around LIBOR and the centrality of the City of London's banks is ended. LIBOR hampered the Fed in handling domestic monetary policy. For the first time in a rate hike cycle the Fed is independent. This also puts the Euro under pressure because the Russians are de-Euro-izing. The exact role of the Bank of England is unclear--they still want to influence others, just as MI6 tries to do foreign policy for everybody else. But these old systems are breaking down, and the key is that the European Central Bank, the ECB, is the weakest player.
We're seeing the end of the British Empire and we're seeing a gigantic post imperial tantrum. People in Britain are much more concerned about inflation. But the problem in Britain is a completely closed political class. The British uniparty. There's an increase in smaller anti-establishment parties.
AND, IN THE NEWS:
I should be clear that I don't necessarily endorse everything that was said. For example, re Moskva, there are conflicting accounts and all is simply not clear:
https://twitter.com/MihajlovicMike/status/1516453769990610950?cxt=HHwWjIC96eqqw4sqAAAA
OTOH, there is the possibility that the truth is being hidden for various reasons.
As the Kevin Kline character said in "A Fish Called Wanda," without the U.S. the U.K. would be the "smallest f**king province in the Russian empire." Is anybody else getting abso-effing-lutely sick of the MI6 screwing with U.S. presidential politics and fomenting a European land war against the will of 75% of the American people ("Let's you and him get together and fight it out")? Should U.S. politics actually realign to the America First agenda, one of the first acts needs to be pulling Little Lord Fauntleroy's knickers down and spanking him until he cannot sit down for a few years.