US/NATO has already lost the war in Ukraine

 

https://youtu.be/mLEFm2BjyoY?si=RvGmnUv2Hg4jlluN

Joti Brar on the human cost of arms industry profits

 

Proletarian TV – 24/07/2023

Richard Wolff: The Economics of the Ukraine War

 

Interview topics:

0:00 - Introduction

0:32 - "Economic War" with Russia?

12:01 - Moral significance of Western sanctions

14:20 - Economic impact on the United States

21:07 - Economic impact of military spending

32:21 - Economic impact on Ukraine

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All The Young Dudes, Carry The (Russian) News – Pepe Escobar

 

Kolozeg - 25/09/2022

The SCO in Samarkand and the UN General Assembly have demonstrated how virtually the whole Global South outside of NATOstan does not demonize Russia.

Geopolitical tectonic plates are reelin’ and rockin’, and the sound is heard all around the world, as the twin baby bears DPR and LPR plus Kherson and Zaporozhye vote on their referendums. Irretrievable fact: by the end of next week Russia most certainly will be on the way to add over 100,000 km2 and over 5 million people to the Federation.

Denis Pushilin, head of the DPR, summed it all up: “We’re going home”. The baby bears are coming to Mama.

Coupled with the partial mobilization of up to 300,000 Russian reservists – arguably just a first phase – the raise-the-stakes consequences are immense. Exit the previous soft format of the Special Military Operation (SMO): enter serious kinetic war, not hybrid, against any actor, vassal or otherwise, that dares to attack Russian territory.

There’s a very short window of Chinese-coined crisis/opportunity for the collective West, or NATOstan, to negotiate. They won’t. Even as anyone with an IQ over room temperature knows that the only way for the Empire of Chaos/Lies/Plunder to “win” – outside of the cover of The Economist – would be by launching a first-strike flurry of tactical nuclear weapons, which would meet a devastating Russian response.

The Kremlin knows it – President Putin has publicly alluded to it; the Russian General Staff (RGS) knows it; the Chinese know it (and have called, also publicly, for negotiations).

Instead, we have hysterical Russophobia reaching a paroxysm. And from the deer-caught-in-the-headlights vassals, an extra toxic sludge of fear and loathing.

Implications have been sharply and rationally addressed at The Saker and by Andrei Martyanov. On the realm of social network “influencing” – a key component of hybrid war – cheap entertainment has been provided by everyone from frightened Eurocrats to crappy retired U.S. generals threatening a “devastating strike” against the Black Sea Fleet “if Vladimir Putin uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine”.

One of these specimens is a mere P.R. front man for an Atlanticist think tank. He was properly disposed of by the now totally unplugged deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev: “Retired idiots with general’s stripes do not need to scare us with talk about a NATO strike on Crimea.”

Freak out on a moonage daydream? Oh yeah. Tawdry wet dreams, stripped off the Bowie glow.

Maskirovka meets Sun Tzu

Moscow’s rerouted strategy takes maskirovka – mask, feint, fool the enemy – to another level, actually dropping the mask, plus the velvet gloves. Now it’s all very clear: this is turbo-charged Sun Tzu (“May your plans be dark and impenetrable like the night, and when you move, strike like lightning.”)

There will be plenty of strikes like lightning ahead in the Ukrainian battlefield. This is the culmination of a process that started in Samarkand, during the SCO summit last week. According to diplomatic sources, Putin and Xi Jinping had a very serious conversation. Xi asked tough questions – as in you must finish this off – and Putin arguably explained how things would reach the next level.

Yoda Patrushev was on the road to China immediately afterwards – meeting with his Yoda counterpart Yang Jiechi, head of the Foreign Affairs Commission, and the secretary of the Central Political and Legal Committee, Guo Shengkun.

Following-up on Samarkand, Patrushev outlined how Moscow will help Beijing militarily when the Empire tries anything funny in the next battlefield: Asia-Pacific. That should happen under the framework of the SCO. Crucially, the Patrushev meetings were requested by the Chinese.

So the Russia-China strategic partnership is about to achieve full-fledged cooperation before the going gets tough in the South China Sea. It’s as if Russia-China were on the brink of creating their own CSTO.

And that is happening even as the Chinese leadership continues to express – mostly in private – that war in Russia’s western borderlands is very bad for business (BRI, EAEU, SCO, BRICS+, all of them) and should be wrapped up a.s.a.p.

The problem is a swift wrap-up is off the cards. Foreign Minister Lavrov, in New York for the UN General Assembly, has stressed how.

“Ukraine has eventually become a totalitarian Nazi sort of state” – unconditionally supported by the collective West.

NATOstan has predictably doubled down on its tactics since the non-response response to Russia’s demand for a serious discussion on indivisibility of security, in late 2021: it’s always about shelling Donbass.

This could not possibly be tolerated anymore by the Kremlin and Russian public opinion. Thus the partial mobilization – forcefully proposed by the siloviki and the Security Council for quite a while now, with Kostyukov at GRU, Naryshkin at SVR and Bortnikov at FSB on the forefront.

The symbolism is powerful: after so many years, Moscow is finally fully committed to supporting Donbass all the way to the baby bears coming to Mama for good.

There are – unconfirmed – rumors in Moscow that the decision was accelerated because GRU has intel on the Americans soon transferring long-range missiles to Kiev capable of striking Russian cities. That’s beyond a red line for the Kremlin – hence Putin’s express mention that every weapon available in Russia’s mighty arsenal will be used to protect the Motherland.

The red line is even more relevant than the much-ballyhooed Kiev all out counter-offensive, which could only happen by Spring 2023. With the partial mobilization, Russia may count on a new batch of fresh troops ready for war by the end of the year. The much-touted Ukrainian numerical advantage will soon be nullified.

Slaves humming “Das Rheingold”

So the General Winter picture will be unveiling considerably less slow grind – the prevailing tactic so far – and way more vast scale maneuver war cum devastating strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure.

Europe meanwhile may go dark and freezing, flirting with a return to the Middle Ages, but the imperial Lords of War still will refuse to negotiate. The Kremlin and the RGS couldn’t care less. Because Russian public opinion overwhelmingly understands the Big Picture. Ukraine is just a pawn in their game – and what “they” want is to destroy and plunder Russia.

Defense Minister Shoigu put it in a – factual – way even a kid can understand. Russia is fighting the collective West; Western command centers in Kiev are running the show; and the entire array of NATO military and “civilian” satellites is mobilized against Russia.

By now it’s already clear. If these NATO command centers tell Kiev to strike Russian territory after the referendums, we will have the Putin-promised decimation of “centers of decision”. And the same applies to the satellites.

This may be what the RGS wanted to do from the beginning. Now they can finally implement it, because of popular support in the internal front. This crucial factor is what NATOstan “intel” simply cannot understand and/or is incapable of professionally evaluating.

Former Pentagon advisor during the Trump administration, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, an extremely rare voice of sanity in the Beltway, totally understands the stakes: “Russia already controls the territory that produces 95 percent of Ukrainian GDP. It has no need to press further west.” Donbass will be fully liberated and the next step is Odessa. Moscow is “in no hurry. The Russians are nothing if not methodical and deliberate. Ukrainian forces are bleeding to death in counterattack after counterattack. Why rush?”

The SCO in Samarkand and the UN General Assembly have amply demonstrated how virtually the whole Global South outside of NATOstan does not demonize Russia, understand Russia’s position, and even profits from it, like China and India buying loads of gas and paying in rubles.

And then there’s the euro/dollar shuffle: to save the U.S. dollar, the Empire is breaking the euro. This is arguably the (italics mine) power play by the USG/Fed in cutting off the EU – most of all Germany – from cheap Russian energy by organizing a controlled demolition of the European economy and its currency.

Yet StupidEUROcrats are so cosmically incompetent they never saw it coming. So now they’d better start humming “Das Rheingold” all the way to a “hello darkness, my old friend” Middle Ages revival.

Switching to a Monty Python register, the sketch would run like an evil Putin masterminding the wreck of the Euro economy and industry; then making the Euros donate all their weapons to Ukraine; and then leaving NATO stranded in the fog, yelling desperate platitudes. In the end, Putin gets rid of his mask – after all, this is maskirovka – and reveals his true usual suspect face.

All the young dudes, carry the (Russian) news: let’s rock. It’s strike like lightning time.

★

Russia and China haven’t even started to ratchet up the pain dial — Pepe Escobar

 

The Saker – 13/07/2022

   Posted with the author’s permission

The Suicide Spectacular Summer Show, currently on screen across Europe, proceeds in full regalia, much to the astonishment of virtually the whole Global South: a trashy, woke Gotterdammerung remake, with Wagnerian grandeur replaced by twerking.

Decadent Roman Emperors at least exhibited some degree of pathos. Here we’re just faced by a toxic mix of hubris, abhorrent mediocrity, delusion, crude ideological sheep-think and outright irrationality wallowing in white man’s burden racist/supremacist slush – all symptoms of a profound sickness of the soul.

To call it the Biden-Leyen-Blinken West or so would be too reductionist: after all these are puny politico/functionaries merely parroting orders. This is a historical process: physical, psychic and moral cognitive degeneration embedded in NATOstan’s manifest desperation in trying to contain Eurasia, allowing occasional tragicomic sketches such as a NATO summit proclaiming Woke War against virtually the whole non-West.

So when President Putin addresses the collective West in front of Duma leaders and heads of political parties, it does feel like a comet striking an inert planet. It’s not even a case of “lost in translation”. “They” simply aren’t equipped to get it.

The “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” part was at least formulated to be understood even by simpletons:

“Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield, well, what can I say, let them try. We have heard many times that the West wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian – this is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people. But it looks like it’s all coming to this. But everyone should know that, by and large, we haven’t really started anything yet.”

Fact. On Operation Z, Russia is using a fraction of its military potential, resources and state of the art weapons.

Then we come to the most probable path ahead in the war theater:

“We do not refuse peace negotiations, but those who refuse should know that the longer it drags, the more difficult it will be for them to negotiate with us.”

As in the pain dial will be ratcheted up, slowly but surely, on all fronts.

Yet the meat of the matter had been delivered earlier in the speech: “ratcheting up the pain dial” applies in fact to dismantling the whole “rules-based international order” edifice. The geopolitical world has changed. Forever.

Here’s the arguably key passage:

“They should have understood that they have already lost from the very beginning of our special military operation, because its beginning means the beginning of a radical breakdown of the World Order in the American way. This is the beginning of the transition from liberal-globalist American egocentrism to a truly multipolar world – a world based not on selfish rules invented by someone for themselves, behind which there is nothing but the desire for hegemony, not on hypocritical double-standards, but on international law, on the true sovereignty of peoples and civilizations, on their will to live their historical destiny, their values and traditions and build cooperation on the basis of democracy, justice and equality. And we must understand that this process can no longer be stopped.”

Meet the trifecta

A case can be made that Putin and Russia’s Security Council are implementing a tactical trifecta that has reduced the collective West to an amorphous bunch of bio headless chickens.

The trifecta mixes the promise of negotiations – but only when considering Russia’s steady advances on the ground in Novorossiya; the fact that Russia’s global “isolation” has been proved in practice to be nonsense; and tweaking the most visible pain dial of them all: Europe’s dependence on Russian energy.

The main reason for the graphic, thundering failure of the G20 Foreign Ministers summit in Bali is that the G7 – or NATOstan plus American colony Japan – could not force the BRICS plus major Global South players to isolate, sanction and/or demonize Russia.

On the contrary: multiple interpolations outside of the G20 spell out even more Eurasia-wide integration. Here are a few examples.

The first transit of Russian products to India via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) is now in effect, crisscrossing Eurasia from Mumbai to the Baltic via Iranian ports (Chabahar or Bandar Abbas), the Caspian Sea, and Southern and Central Russia. Crucially, the route is shorter and cheaper than going through the Suez Canal.

In parallel, the head of the Iranian Central Bank, Ali Salehabadi, confirmed that a memorandum of interbank cooperation was signed between Tehran and Moscow.

That means a viable alternative to SWIFT, and a direct consequence of Iran’s application to become a full BRICS member, announced at the recent summit in Beijing. The BRICS, since 2014, when the New Development Bank (NDB) was founded, have been busy building their own financial infrastructure, including the near future creation of a single reserve currency. As part of the process, the harmonization of Russian and Iranian banking systems is inevitable.

Iran is also about to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at the upcoming summit in Samarkand in September.

In parallel, Russia and Kazakhstan are solidifying their strategic partnership: Kazakhstan is a key member of BRI, EAEU and SCO.

India gets even closer to Russia across the whole spectrum of trade – including energy.

And next Tuesday, Tehran will be the stage for a crucial face-to-face meeting between Putin and Erdogan.

Isolation? Really?

On the energy front, it’s only summer, but demented paranoia is already raging across multiple EU latitudes, especially Germany. Comic relief is provided by the fact that Gazprom can always point out to Berlin that eventual supplying problems on Nord Stream 1 – after the cliffhanger return of that notorious repaired turbine from Canada – can always be solved by implementing Nord Stream 2.

As the whole European Suicide Spectacular Summer Show is nothing but a tawdry self-inflicted torture ordered by His Master’s Voice, the only serious question is which pain dial level will force Berlin to actually sit down and negotiate on behalf of legitimate German industrial and social interests.

Rough and tumble will be the norm. Foreign Minister Lavrov summed it all up when commenting on the Declining Collective West Ministers striking poses like infantile brats in Bali to avoid being seen with him: that was up to “their understanding of the protocols and politeness.”

That’s diplo-talk for “bunch of jerks”. Or worse: cultural barbarians, as they were even unable to respect the hyper-polite Indonesian hosts, who abhor confrontation.

Lavrov preferred to extol the “joint strategic and constructive” Russian-Chinese work when faced with a very aggressive West. And that brings us to the prime masterpiece of shadowplay in Bali – complete with several layers of geopolitical fog.

Chinese media, always flirting with the opaque, tried to put its bravest face ever depicting the over 5-hour meeting between Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Secretary Blinken as “constructive”.

What’s fascinating here is that the Chinese ended up letting something crucial out of the bag to slip into the final draft of their report – obviously approved by the powers that be.

Lu Xiang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences went through previous readouts – especially of “Yoda” Yang Jiechi routinely turning Jake Sullivan into roasted duck – and stressed that this time Wang’s “warnings” to the Americans were “the sternest one in wording”.

That’s diplo-code for “You Better Watch Out”: Wang telling Little Blinkie, “just look at what the Russians did when they lost their patience with your antics.”

The expression ”dead end” was recurrent during the Wang-Blinken meeting. So in the end the Global Times had to tell it like it really is: “The two sides are close to a showdown.”

“Showdown” is what End of Days fanatic and Tony Soprano wannabe Mike Pompeo is fervently preaching from his hate pulpit, while the combo behind the senile “leader of the free world” who literally reads teleprompters actively work for the crashing of the EU – in more ways than one.

The combo in power in Washington actually “supports” the unification of Britain, Poland, Ukraine and The Three Baltic Midgets as a separate alliance from NATO/EU – aiming at “strengthening the defense potential.” That’s the official position of US Ambassador to NATO Julian Smith.

So the real imperial aim is to split the already shattering EU into mini-union pieces, all of them quite fragile and evidently more “manageable”, as Brussels Eurocrats, blinded by boundless mediocrity, obviously can’t see it coming.

What the Global South is buying

Putin always makes it very clear that the decision to launch Operation Z – as a sort of pre-emptive “combined arms and police operation”, as defined by Andrei Martyanov – was carefully calculated, considering an array of material and socio-psychological vectors.

Anglo-American strategy, for its part, lasers on a single obsession: damn any possible reframing of the current “rules-based international order”. No holds are barred to ensure the perpetuity of this order. This is in fact Totalen Krieg – featuring several hybrid layers, and quite worrying, with only a few seconds to midnight.

And there’s the rub. Desolation Row is fast becoming Desperation Row, as the whole Russophobic matrix is shown to be naked, devoid of any extra ideological – and even financial – firepower to “win”, apart from shipping a collection of HIMARS to a black hole.

Geopolitically and geoeconomically, Russia and China are in the process of eating NATOstan alive – in more ways than one. Here, for instance, is a synthetic road map of how Beijing will address the next stage of high-quality development via capital-driven industrial upgrading, focused on optimization of supply chains, import substitution of hard technologies, and “invisible champions” of industry.

If the collective West is blinded by Russophobia, the governing success of the Chinese Communist Party – which in a matter of a few decades improved the lives of more people than anyone, anytime in History – drives it completely nuts.

All along the Russia-China watchtower, it’s been not such a long time coming. BRI was launched by Xi Jinping in 2013. After Maidan in 2014, Putin launched the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) in 2015. Crucially, in May 2015, a Russia-China joint statement sealed the cooperation between BRI and EAEU, with a significant role assigned to the SCO.

Closer integration advanced via the St. Petersburg forum in 2016 and the BRI forum in 2017. The overall target: to create a new order in Asia, and across Eurasia, according to international law while maintaining the individual development strategies of each concerned country and respecting their national sovereignty.

That, in essence, is what most of the Global South is buying. It’s as if there’s a cross-border instinctual understanding that Russia-China, against serious odds and facing serious challenges, proceeding by trial and error, are at the vanguard of the Shock of the New, while the collective West, naked, dazed and confused, their masses completely zombified, is sucked into the maelstrom of psychological, moral and material disintegration.

No question the pain deal will be ratcheted up, in more ways than one.

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