YESTERDAY THE WORLD TURNED UPDIDE DOWN

Apr 01, 2022

The Central Bank of Russia officially announced that, as of March 28, 2022, the Russian Ruble currency is BOUND to Gold. The rate is 5,000 Rubles per gram of gold bullion.

Russia just wiped out about 30% of the value of the US Dollar, worldwide, when it comes to Gold Bullion.

Because Russia will only sell its oil and gas in Rubles, now fixed at 5,000 Rubles per gram, anyone wishing to buy Oil or Gas will need to either pay in Rubles or pay in Gold, and they won’t get the US Dollar value for the gold they tender as payment!

People around the world will be literally THROWING their money at the Ruble and DUMPING Dollars and EUROS to do it.

*What Russia just did is the financial equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb.*

USDollar is going into the toilet because Russia looked at the sanctions, LOL'd, and announced it will only accept rubles or gold for energy sales.

Game over petrodollar, you blew it all up.

Dollar hegemony seems to have just ended as of this week very abruptly. Dollar hegemony was when America’s war in Vietnam and the military spending of the 1960s and 70s drove the United States off gold. The entire US balance of payments deficit was military spending, and it began to run down the gold supply. So, in 1971, President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Well, everybody thought America has been controlling the world economy since World War I by having most of the gold and by being the creditor to the world. And they thought what is going to happen now that the United States is running a deficit, instead of being a creditor.

Well, what happened was that, as I’ve described in Super Imperialism, when the United States went off gold, foreign central banks didn’t have anything to buy with their dollars that were flowing into their countries – again, mainly from the US military deficit but also from the investment takeovers. And they found that these dollars came in, the only thing they could do would be to recycle them to the United States. And what do central banks hold? They don’t buy property, usually, back then they didn’t. They buy Treasury bonds. And so, the United States would be spending dollars abroad and foreign central banks didn’t really have anything to do but send it right back to buy treasury bonds to finance not only the balance of payments deficit, but also the budget deficit that was largely military in character. So, dollar hegemony was the system where foreign central banks keep their monetary and international savings reserves in dollars and the dollars are used to finance the military bases around the world, almost eight hundred military bases surrounding them. So, basically central banks have to keep their savings by weaponizing them, by militarizing them, by lending them to the United States, to keep spending abroad.

This gave America a free ride. Imagine if you went to the grocery store and you just paid by giving them an IOU. And then the next week you want to buy more groceries and you give them another IOU. And they say, wait a minute, you have an IOU before and you say, well just use the IOU to pay the milk company that delivers, or the farmers that deliver. You can use this as your money and just you’ll as a customer, keep writing IOU’s and you never have to pay anything because your IOU is other people’s money. Well, that’s what dollar hegemony was, and it was a free ride. And it all ended last Wednesday when the United States grabbed Russia’s reserves...

... all of a sudden, this means that other countries can no longer safely hold their reserves by sending their money back, depositing them in US banks or buying US Treasury Securities, or having other US investments because they could simply be grabbed as happened to Russia. So, all of a sudden this last week, you’re seeing the world economy fracture into two parts, a dollarized part and other countries that do not follow the neoliberal policies that the United States insists that its allies follow. We’re seeing the birth of a new dual World economy.

... the International Monetary Fund has operated, basically, as an arm of the US Defense Department. It’s been bailing out dictatorships, bailing out Ukraine, lending money to countries whose client oligarchies America wants to support, and not lending any money to countries that America doesn’t want to support, like Venezuela. So, its job is basically to promote neoliberal policies, and to insist that other countries balance their payments by undergoing a class war against labor.

The conditionality that the IMF insists upon for foreign borrowing is that countries devalue their currency and lower their wage rates and pass anti-labor legislation. Well, when you lower the currency’s exchange rate, what do you really lower? Food prices are set in dollars internationally, raw materials prices are, and prices for machinery and many goods. The only economic variable devalued is domestic labor (and domestic rents). The IMF has been using this kind of junk-economic free-trade policy as a means of keeping the wage rates in the Global South down. You could say it’s a financialization of an ultimately military conflict to promote neoliberal ideology.

... you mentioned the lowering wages and things like that. And this is actually done because it’s favorable to US investors and US business, right? I mean, the World Bank actually has an index, the cost of doing business index, that helps inform large corporations about laws that countries pass that make them more favorable to businesses to come in.

MH: It’s even worse than that. The central aim of the World Bank is to prevent other countries from growing their own food. That is the prime directive. It will only make loans for countries to earn foreign currency and it has insisted ever since about 1950 that countries that borrow from it must shift their agriculture to plantation export crops to grow tropical crops that cannot be grown in the United States for environmental and weather reasons. And the countries must not grow their own food and must not undertake Land Reform or small family-based farming. So, it insisted on foreign-owned agribusiness in large plantation agriculture. And what that means is that countries that have borrowed for agricultural loans have not been loans to produce their own food. It’s been to compete with each other producing tropical export crops while being increasingly dependent on the United States for their food supplies, and for their grain. And that’s part of the corner they painted them into that is going to be creating such a world famine this summer. Michael Hudson

... they’ve been threatening to kick Russia out of SWIFT for the last two years. And so, Russia and China have been putting in place an alternative system. So, they almost pretty smoothly are shifting over to using their own currency with each other instead of using the dollar. And that’s part of what has ended the dollar standard and ended dollar hegemony.

If the way you have dollar hegemony is to have other countries deposit your money in your banks and handle their oil trade with each other by financing it in dollars, but all of a sudden you grab all their dollars and you don’t let them use US banks to pay for their oil and their trade with each other, then they’re going to shift to a different system. And that’s exactly what has ended the dollar hegemony, as you just pointed out.

you talked about a food crisis this summer. Can you talk a little bit about more about that and does the conflict in Ukraine feed into that?

MH: Well, as President Putin and Lavrov have said, the fighting in Ukraine isn’t really over Ukraine at all. It’s a fight over what shape the world will take and whether the world will be unipolar or, as it now appears, multipolar. The US, for the last year before it began to escalate attacks on the Russian-speaking Ukraine, was trying to block Europe from, and especially Germany, from buying Russia gas and oil.

There are three pillars of American foreign policy that base American power. The first pillar is the oil industry. That’s the most powerful industry next to banking in the United States. And United States throughout the 20th century, along with Britain and France, have controlled the world oil trade.

That has benefited the United States in two ways. Number one, we are a major oil exporter because we have a big oil and gas industry. But, number two, our US companies control the foreign oil trade. So that if some country, say Chile or Venezuela, does something that the United States doesn’t like, like growing their own food or pursuing a socialist policy, the United States can simply cut off their oil and sanction them. Without oil, they don’t have energy to drive the cars or power their factories or drive their GDP.

So, the American war in Ukraine is really a war against Germany. Russia is not the enemy. Germany and Europe are the enemy and the United States made it very clear. This is a war to lock in our allies so they cannot trade with Russia. They cannot buy Russian oil. They must be dependent on American oil for which they will have to pay three or four times as much. They will have to be dependent on American liquefied natural gas for fertilizer. If they don’t buy American gas for fertilizer, and we don’t let them buy from Russia, then they cannot put fertilizer on the land and the crop yield will fall by about 50% without fertilizer.

So, the, the war in Ukraine was to make Russia look so bad by defending itself against the attacks by the Ukrainian right wing in the Russian-speaking areas that the US has said, look at how bad Russia is. You’ve got to forego buying oil and gas or grain or titanium or palladium or anything else from Russia.

And so, the effect of this war has been to lock the NATO countries into dependency on the United States because the great fear of the United States in the last few years is that as America is de-industrializing, these countries are looking to the part of the world that’s growing, China, Central Asia, Russia, South Asia. And the United States feared losing control of its satellites mainly in NATO, but also in South America. So, it sanctioned and blocked their ability to buy non-US energy. They’re blocking their ability to buy non-US food, blocking their ability to invest in or use their surplus to get prosperous by investing in China, Russia, or Eurasia.

So, this is basically a war of America to lock in its allies. Well, the result is that oil prices, now that you can’t get Russian oil, are going to go way, way up, and that is going to create a crisis for many of the Global South countries that are oil deficit countries. The fertilizer companies in Germany have already been closing down because they say, without Russian gas, we make our fertilizer out of gas, and if we can’t get Russian gas, we can’t produce the fertilizer that. So, world fertilizer prices are going way up.

Russia is the largest grain exporter. And now that grain exports are being blocked by the sanctions, the question is, what are North Africa and the Near East going to do that have been depending very largely on Russian grain exports? Their food prices are going to go way up.

You can imagine just from seeing what’s happening in the United States when gas prices go up here, food prices go up here, not only does it put a squeeze on individual family budgets, but throughout the world, it puts the squeeze on the balance of payments of other countries. And so, they’re desperate. How are they going to pay the higher prices unless they borrow even more money from US banks? And of course, that’s another arm of US policy. The US banks hope to make a killing in making loans at rising interest rates to third world countries.

And of course, arms exports. NATO in the last few days has agreed to make American arms exports to increase their purchase of arms. So, the stock market has been soaring in the last few days. They say this, the world famine, the world crisis is a bonanza for Wall Street. The oil company stocks are going way up, the military, industrial stocks, Boeing Raytheon way up, the bank stocks. This is America’s great power grab, and it realizes, when it can create a crisis and tell the Global South or poor countries your money or your life. This is how most of the great property grabs and conquests have been made throughout history.

MF: And just this week at the NATO meetings, President Biden basically said food prices are going to go up in the United States and Europe as a result of what’s happening. And that’s just the price we have to pay.

MH: Well, what he should have said, this is the price they have to pay us. That’s how the stock market took it. When he said this is the price we have to pay, this is the price consumers have to pay to the American oil companies, to the American Agricultural food distribution companies. It’s the price other countries have to pay to the United States.

This is to say to the rest of the world, you know, we’ve got you completely, I don’t know how to put it, what phrase to use, but you don’t have any choice, your money or your life. We’ve got you trapped. And he’s crowing over the fact that this resulting inflation is exactly what was intended by the war in Ukraine that has led to the isolation of Russia and other countries following a non-US policy.

... they will be creating a crisis, but the crisis will lead the rest of the world to treat the United States in the same way that Russia and China are treating the United States, as just the enemy threatening the entire world with their neoliberal power grab. So, the United States in a way is isolating itself from the rest of the world by declaring war on it.

... the environmental movement should become an anti-war movement and the movement against this neoliberal dollar hegemony. there’s really a political movement that is ending up impoverishing, I’d say, 99% of Americans. While the Federal Reserve saves the stock and bond market for the 1%, there’s going to be a huge squeeze that’s going to force, I think, most American families into debt leading to probably a close down of a lot of businesses just as you had the Covid crisis closing down a lot of businesses. You’re going to have the rising fuel prices, the rising food prices utterly force families into default and an inability to be self-supporting without either running into debt or selling their homes and becoming renters.

What Professot Hudson is saying with respect to fossil full consumption and american imperialism being fused together essentially means the US cannot win, it’s fighting again the laws of thermodynamics. Globalisation is over.

from the late T. Boone Pickens as found in the Financial Post Tuesday June 17, 2008:

World crude production has Peaked: Pickens

Washington— World crude oil production has topped out at 85 million barrels per day even as demand keeps climbing, helping to drive a stunning surge in prices, billionaire oil investor T. Boone Pickens said on Tuesday.

“I do believe you have peaked out at 85 million million barrels a day globally,” Mr. Pickens, who heads BP Capital Hedge Fund with more than US$4billion under management, said during testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The United States alone has been using 21 million barrels of the 85 million and producing about 7 of the 21, so if I could take a minute on this point, the demand is about 85 million barrels a day, and when the demand is greater than the supply, the price has to go up until it kills demand,” Mr. Pickens told lawmakers.

US Crude futures have risen by a third since the start of the year and more than sixfold since 2002 as surging demand from China and other developing nations outpaces new production.

Oil slipped on Tuesday, a day after touching a record high near 140 a barrel, but remained above US 133 a barrel.

Mr. Pickens, who announced a US $2 billion investment in wind energy earlier this year, told lawmakers during a hearing on renewable electricity that he expected “The price of oil will go up further.” Without alternatives, the cost of foreign oil will drain the United States of more resources, he said.

OUCH? Yes? and perhaps the why as well to Washingtons madness. I’d imagine there are those who aren’t sleeping very well at night?

The cracks are forming and getting bigger by the day on the frozen lake of our society!

from the late T. Boone Pickens as found in the Financial Post Tuesday June 17, 2008:

World crude production has Peaked: Pickens

US Crude futures have risen by a third since the start of the year and more than sixfold since 2002 as surging demand from China and other developing nations outpaces new production.

Oil slipped on Tuesday, a day after touching a record high near 140 a barrel, but remained above US 133 a barrel.

OUCH? Yes, and perhaps the Why as well to Washingtons madness. I’d imagine there are those who aren’t sleeping very well at night?

The cracks are forming and getting bigger by the day on the frozen lake of our societies!

I’m wondering if that’s the why to Washington’s madness. I’m not sure, for 2 main reasons:

1) if they did get it, they would understand that the FIRE (finance, insurance, Real estate) sector-generated wealth on which that cabal relies as a class and individually probably cannot be handed down even to their own kids, it will dissipate quite fast and become meaningless in an energy constrained world. In other words, the superiority that they feel as a class and that enables them to justify all the shit they impose on the 99%, believing they will be and stay better off, is not sustainable. What is more sustainable is wealth from real productive economic activity, to a certain extent. But you have to build a well-functioning society to have that, with much lower class disparity. (the Chinese have spent the last two years limiting the scope and importance of the FIRE sector in their country, they are talking a lot about common prosperity… is there a link?) Maybe the masters in Washington are angling for a Madmax-style dystopia because power over others is more important to them than even their own standard of living, but again that doesn’t look very robust as a long term plan;

2) O&G (oil and gas) in the US is from unconventional sources, with very low EROI. (environmental return on investment). LNG (liquid natural gas) exports to Europe further lower the EROI. From a thermodynamic point of view, it does not make sense to spend 1 unit of energy to extract 1 unit of usable energy – without even taking into account the energy required to maintain the energy extraction infrastructure, equipment and processes, or the rest of the productive economy! I find convincing the argument that unconventional O&G has worked to some extent in the US but only because they can just print money to finance it – but credit is available for unproductive activity only as long as the dollar is the reserve currency, and as prof Hudson is saying, that’s about to end. Without the dollar as the world reserve currency, the US stops producing O&G.

So all in all, I believe Washington’s behaviour is uninformed by these considerations.

I think you’re right about rationing. As a North American, I’m scared for the future of my kids. It looks brighter for Zone B. But so much rides on the current battle. If Russia caves in, down the toilet goes the Westphalian state model, and the globalist pan-national elite of the west wins.

Martyanov was reporting this morning that the Russian atlanticists are being sidelined. With the other recent exiles, Glazyev’s elevated role, maybe Russia will actually seize its advantage as a nation?

IF not then we go back to Washington’s madness: will they ever stop escalating? I was reading in Asiatimes (David Goldman) yesterday that Shoigu and Putin had just flown to 2 bunkers, so high was the threat of nuclear exchange…

The point that Micheal Hudson is trying to make here is we don’t really need to be distracted by the MSM narrative and or opposing narratives (click bait), we need to focus on where the money actually goes and the alternative to that. They hate it when we think about that.

The age of unilateral Western hegemony for all basic purposes is finished. What is needed from leaders of nations in the Global South is to not let this golden opportunity for self-determination pass them by.

Sorry, but when I see someone push the global warming scam, then that person is completely dead to me. At the very best, this guy is a gatekeeper who tells you partial truths just so that he can get your trust so that he can lead you into the next scam. I have invested many many hours into studying global warming. And right from the beginning it was obvious that it is an obvious scam. Everyone who spends some time on studying the issue MUST come to the same conclusion. Everyone who claims that global warming is a real issue is either an idiot or a dirty liar.

Rokossovsky on March 31, 2022 · at 1:03 pm EST/EDT

Ferdl: Yeah… in addition to that, Margaret Flowers led the discussion with Hudson off with 10 minutes of “other concerning news from around the world” that included the National General Strike going on in India. But if you look into it, you find funding from the Gates Foundation, Soros and the NED pouring into that Indian “strike”. Thus, it has the nascent makings of another Euro-Maiden Color Revolution all over it, if Modi isn’t careful. And then U.S. deputy national security adviser for economics Daleep Singh lands in the middle of all of that to pressure Modi to sanction Russia? I have not gone into Flower’s history, but when Euro-Maidan was rebranded the “Revolution of Dignity” it isn’t too hard to imagine Flowers announcing similar support for it. And that turned out to be the trigger for the very thing she is concerned about now. (facepalm)

So, maybe Hudson has the same blind spots? If you are used to looking at the world through a Left-Right prism, as our elites keeping pushing us to do, you can’t spot the real struggle going on. It seems odd to me, given all the duplicity Hudson has seen, that he would not question the Climate Narrative, especially for all the stakes and money involved. Does he really think that all of the crooks running the US Deep State give a flying f_ck for the Earth’s climate? Within 3 days of the chemical attack in Syria, Kerry was pushing for a US war in Syria, and now Kerry is the US climate ambassador? C’mon man. (sigh)

When I run into people like Hudson (and Flowers), who appear so smart in one area, it just BAFFLES ME that they appear so naïve or ignorant in other areas. Are they gatekeepers or dupes? I can’t tell.

You are absolutely correct. I am very surprised at Dr. Hudson’s naive view of effects of climate change. The climate scam is lead by a group of rent seekers who are determined to solve a future problem which may not happen with tools which are untested and have no way of being validated. Not only that but in cases where they have tried to “fight climate change”, like Germany or the UK, by using renewable energy, it failed spectacularly.

>The current IRBO (international rules-based order) is supposedly a western system of international norms and institutions.

>The new international law-based system will emphasise multipolar cooperation

>The apparent, ongoing antagonism of geopolitics looks likely to maintain the East-West divide we are familiar with. However, what is now being framed as the multipolar order is, in reality, the multistakeholder order.

[link to unlimitedhangout.com (secure)]

In this article, we will explore the true nature of the international rules-based order (IRBO) and examine the forces that shape it. We will consider if the narratives we are commonly fed stack up.

It is widely accepted that the IRBO is undergoing disruptive change. That transformation is often reported as an eastward shift in the balance of power between nation states.

It is said that this new, emerging international order will be founded upon a global multipolar system of sovereign states and international law. This new system allegedly stands in opposition to the fading, western “rules-based” model.

This time, rather than relying upon western imperialism, the new international law-based system will emphasise multipolar cooperation, trade and respect for national sovereignty. It will instead be led by a Eurasian economic and technological power-block.

The apparent, ongoing antagonism of geopolitics looks likely to maintain the East-West divide we are familiar with. However, what is now being framed as the multipolar order is, in reality, the multistakeholder order.

As we shall discover, nation states are not the driving force behind the current restructuring of global governance. The geopolitical narratives we are given are frequently superficial.

Those leading the transformation have no allegiance to any nation state, only to their own globalist network and collective aspirations. In their hands, international law is no more of an impediment to their ambitions than a vague commitment to “rules.”

National governments are partners within this network formed of both state and non-state actors. Despite professed animosities, they have collaborated for decades to fashion the global governance complex that is now emerging.

No matter who is said to lead it, the IRBO is set to continue in a new form. As the post WWII system recedes, the framework being imposed to take its place is completely alien to the people who live in the former western, liberal democracies.

Thus, we too must be transformed if we are to accept the realignment. We are being conditioned to believe in the promise of the new IRBO and the global technocracy it is built upon.

Any real environmental movement must be by definition an anti-war movement. War is the most destructive human activity to the environment.Any real environmentalist is always opposed to war, and will usually think this would be a much better planet if there was a lot less military stuff going on. A pro-war environmentalist is what Orwell named as ‘doublethink’.

America has a poet with a Nobel Prize in Literature. It is no surprise that within his works, one can find the perfect expression of the ‘Rules Based Order’.

“Look Out Kid!

It’s Something you Did!

You don’t know when

but you’re doing it again.”

— ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ by Bob Dylan

Anyone who’s grown up in America knows that the Rules Based Order very quickly comes down to an angry red face inches away from your face yelling “Its a Rule Because I Say So!”.

And its usually a pretty short trip to get there from ideals of Freedom and Democracy. Often, it can be accomplished with a single, one-syllable word ….. “Why?”

That’s the way Americans are treated within this land of freedom with the world’s largest prison population.

Bruce Kirschman

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