Time To Bring The Empire Home

Yesterday I linked to Part Two of BLOWING UP ALLIES + KILLING EMPIRE - TOM LUONGO & ALEXANDER MERCOURIS. Today Part Three became available. I was so struck by the first nine minutes or so that I transcribed it. Then I decided to publish it tonight because I’ll be doing some more mental health work tomorrow, Ash Wednesday.

Among other ideas that struck me, these stand out:

• Russia has yet to use its knockout blow—demanding gold in payment for oil. Instead, it’s calmly destroying NATO, taking its time.

• All the money the US is investing in “restocking” our armory—that will only work if we bring the Empire home. This should be an obvious point, and it’s one that Doug Macgregor has been making at every opportunity. This spells the end of NATO.

• A telltale sign that we’ve already lost is that—for the first time in 12 years—the Saudi foreign minister will meet with the Syrian foreign minister. That means that the petrodollar is on the way out, that the privileged status of King Dollar is coming to an end, and that some sort of reconciliation is under way between the Sunni and Shiite worlds. The US order of the Middle East is coming to an end. The economic war end game is in sight.

• The power centers of Old Europe are desperate to lock the US into their parochial corner, but there’s nothing in it for the US. The Neocons are desperate to stick with Europe to refight their old grievances, but it just may be that others in the US see it differently.

BLOWING UP ALLIES + KILLING EMPIRE - TOM LUONGO & ALEXANDER MERCOURIS - PART 3 OF 3

Tom: That's why these aid packages [for Ukraine] keep going through, and why they rammed through the $1.7 trillion spending bill, and all the other stuff. It's all just pressure to stop what's clearly happening here, which is that the off-shore dollar markets are drying up. The Fed only raised a quarter point this month, and the more I thought about it the more it became obvious they didn't need to do more than that because eventually the markets were going to catch up to the fact that The Fed has already done enough. The ECB has been exposed as completely dead in the water. I was chatting with Danielle DiMartino-Booth the other day and she said, 'Quietly in the background, QT [Quantitative Tightening] is ticking away, pulling out dollar liquidity from around the world.' At the same time, the US banking system is getting recapitalized, because the reverse repo facility has come down from $2.5 trillion to $2 trillion, and now you can go get 4% in the money markets. So the banks don't have to be sitting in reverse repos, money doesn't have to be parked at The Fed, it can go back into the general economy. Into the banking system, so the banking system is flush with liquidity. But here we are at almost 5%. Everybody told me a year ago that if The Fed goes to 1% the whole thing's gonna collapse. Now the Eurodollar future market is talking 5.5% terminal rate in June--got news for ya: It's going to 7%.

Alex: Going back to your previous point about Ukraine, if there really is a line drawn [by the US] in the summer then you have to sack these people. You have to boot out Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland ...

That last comment refers to rumors that CIA Director Burns’ recent trip to Kiev was to tell Zelensky that the US would pull the financial plug by summer.

Tom: There's so many things happening in May and June. We're back to this cluster of events in May and June. The Republicans on Capitol Hill have to this point been feckless and useless. But they have the opportunity here to get their pound of flesh. They can get their revenge, setting up for the 2024 election cycle, to change the dynamic. We've egregiously increased defense spending in the last five years, from just under $700 billion to over $850 billion--money we don't have. Clearly we're not gonna spend it on Ukraine. If we're gonna restock the US military then you hafta bring the Empire home. Which is why the Neocons are desperate to win in Ukraine: to prove that the Empire is still viable. And that speaks to the anger of the Poles and the Brits and the Estonians and all the people traditionally who are going, 'OMG no! You can't do this! Because then you're giving up the heartland to Russia, and the Chinese, and the Iranians!' Well, it's happening anyway. When the Saudi foreign minister is meeting with the Syrian foreign minister for the first time in 12 years, I've got news for ya--we've already lost! So get over yourselves. You're not going to win by dumping more people into Bakhmut.

Alex: You've got this exactly correct. You're completely right about what you say about the Baltic states, people in Poland--not everybody in Poland--and of course the British establishment. One of the reasons they're so hysterical and shrill, so aggressive in pushing this war, is that they're absolutely terrified that the US is going to leave them. This is partly what this war is all about--trying to lock the US into Europe and enable [European power centers] to keep their various little projects going, y'know WEF as well. And all this hysteria, all this anger--far more of it in Europe, by the way, than in the US--that's what's driving it. They're absolutely scared that unless they can somehow demolish Russia--and they can't do it without American power--there is no way they [Europe] can compete with the Russian mega industrial base. I'm not comparing Russia with the US. I'm comparing Russia with Europe. European industry is not structured to do this. They need the US. That's why they're keeping this hysteria and anger going on.

Tom: That's why we should be very skeptical of the US "rogue state" narrative [about Russia]. There's no upside for the US in promulgating that narrative. This is why I was so worried about the initial response to the Sy Hersh article, whitewashing the motives of the people who are most stridently worried about the collapse of the old European security architecture, and the vestiges of their own empires. The Poles, the Brits, and all the rest. The globalists within the WEF. We know that the British are deeply embedded within the State Department and the CIA--it's been this way for years! Organizationally the OSS was built on British intelligence--ya think that organizational model's been updated? ...

The old power centers are freaking out. They've always been able to lever up the dominant currency to their advantage to start wars. This time they've started the war but they don't know how to finish it, because they're fighting against opponents [the Russians] who understand the dynamics of the game for the first time. WW2 they didn't understand it. WW1 they didn't understand it. Napoleon, they didn't understand it. The Russians clearly understand it this time, so do the Chinese. We haven't even got to their knockout blow, which is to simply demand gold for oil. These cards are not being played at this point, and [the Russians] don't even have to. They'll just grind out Ukrainians in Bakhmut, grind out old NATO tanks and artillery and all the rest of it, and just let it keep ticking away in the background--like The Fed's QT.

09:25