IMF has listed the global winners and losers on the economic ladder for 2022 and same time predicted the position of the major players for 2023 and 2024.
But I have a reason to seriously question IMF’s ability, or honesty in such predictions. And yes, the war against Russia has lots to do with it.
But first, let us check what the report says. It says advanced countries had a growth of 2.7% in 2022, which will fall to 1.2% this year and creep up to 1.4% next year. BRaking that down, it predicts the figures for the US are 2.0, 1.4 & 1.0. I have many reasons to seriously doubt such estimates. Everybody knows US GDP on purchasing power actually shrank last year and did not at all grow 2%. It however predicts an actual shrinkage of the British economy in 2023. But surprisingly, most European economies will continue to rise, though just barely above zero.
Then comes the so called developing nations. Earlier they used to call the rest as backward nations, but the west has learned to be more polite these days. China, considered as the most powerful economy in the world today, outpacing the Americans, are slotted within this developing group.
Check China, the largest economy today. It’s growth is reported to have been 3% last year, but expected to jump to 5.2 this year. Among the large economies, India seems to be the shining example in this report, and much talked about due to its contribution within BRICS+ and the collective clout of this group agaisnt the developped group. Along with them, there are more potential BRICS+ joiners that are also star performers – Saudi Arabia, Middle East & Central Asia.
Note – Russia is missing here.
It has taken me a long time to figure out that rankings, past statistics and future predictions of economic activity of nations around the world, projected by mostly renowned western intitutions, are tainted and in some cases, fraudulent, to give the wrong impression to readers, say about promoting Russophobia.
This is not unlike how Facebook, Google search, YouTube, the US Government, and mostly all media channels also project the news heavily biased to suit agendas of the folks that own or control these institutions.
Of recent – I have spent time and effort to dig into Russia, to figure out how a country, Russia, can not only fight off the collective might of the entire western nations plus a few non-westerns (e.g. Japan), if Russia’s Economy was less than a twentieth of the collective West+. To me, modern warfare is highly dependent on the economic, industrial, resource base & scientific details of the parties engaged.
On paper, the collective west has more than twenty times the economy, and incalculably high amount of financial, legal, social, and industrial capacity. Russia has often been described dismissively as a country that is little more than a gas station, ruled by a despotic dictator.
If the economic forecast, and calculations of industrial base are correct, then, considering the attack on all fronts, military, economic and everything else, directed agaisnt Russia by USA/NATO, then Russia should have been dismembered, sliced and gobbled up within a month of the beginnign of hostilities.
But the way it looks, the collective west is fallling on its face.
To me, this is a very strong indication that the western projection of most all data, economic included, is fradulent and has been misinforming the people about facts and misleading them down the wrong path.
Russian economy, after the Yeltsin induced free fall, was considered to be ranked way below the top ten and somewhere at par with perhaps Spain. I know in my guts thats a lie, because Russia is able to shrug off near total sanction by the entire west, and is able to outproduce the west in military hardware, and able to invesnt, design and produce deadlier weaponry, staying ahead of the west, and its currency is strengthening instead of weaking.
This tells me two things:
1) Russian economy, science and industrial base are far stronger than projected.
2) The economic predictions by the western financial institutions are crap.
I have mulled into the reports, as a marine engineer and not as an economist, which I am not, I have actually placed a lot of data in my own giant spreadsheets to check how they look if I try to projust something taking into account various factors within my own knowledge and hunch.
PricewaterhouseCooper International is an intriguing source. It is a vast network of accountancy firms spread across the globle, that provides assurance, tax and advisory services. They are everywhere, including India. They make their own predictions, and some of it is interesting, and often different in the message they send out, compared to the US Govt, the World Bank or the IMF, or what you might read in Financial Times.
The attached chart is from this network of accountancy firms. If you see their 2016 data, the so called emerging economies already carry more punch than the so called advanced nations (G7 versus E7). You did not know about it because G7 is an established group that meet every year and take collective decisions. E7 did not up to recently. They do not even identify themselves as E7. But much of that is now changing, thanks to BRICS+, and the Ukraine conflict and US hegemony.
Thus, the Ukraine conflict has been a massive game changer that is threatening to shred the existing world order as well as Klaus Schwab’s GEF based plans of a new kind of world order.
By 2050, it looks like game over for the west. Six out of seven top econolies will be non western, the US being the only exception. Indonesia, who nobody hears about, will be the 4th largest economy in the world.
But what about Russia? Well, PWC is also a western network. Somehow, their study is likely based on western projections. Even then, Russia is present, at 6th place in both columns. This too, I suspect, is biased and wrong.
I have heard some Dutch experts comment that Russian Economic and Industrial might is not understood well by the west and they are now highly biased against Russia, hence the projections show them absurdly lower than others. I think he was speaking the truth.
WIthout being an economist (thank heavens), I suspect the Russian industrial/scientific/economic acumen, combined with their near inexhaustible richness in resources like energy, food, and gold, their actual ranking should place them between 3rd and 4th today. I cannot predict 2050 since it is too far away.
Then, considering the top Emerging nations – E7, is already stronger than the G7, and are mostly aligned behind Russia in this Ukraine conflict, I cannot help but suspect that the combined West might be facing a long term sunset scenario. The only direction open for them is sliding downhill. Unfortunately, USA exerts a near iron grip on the groups outlook and activity. So USA is likely to drag the rest of the west along with them.
IF we do not have a nuclear holocaust, or a financial meltdown with GEF initiated digital currency surveillance world, which the non-West are possibly likely to reject sooner or later, once they get their act together – I think it may be game over and a reverse migration era will start. People of the west will try to learn Mandarin, Hindi, and Russian, and hope to get a job away from home, much like many Europeans for two hundred years, took all their belongings and hopped a ship heading for New York.
I am still mulling how to connect these dots. But I am already guessing that Russia is at the fulcrum. It is neither eastern nor western. It is Euratian. It appears close to west, but is anchored in Asia. Russia is, in my thinking, likely to be the largest swing state.
Apart from Russia being at the fulcrum, there are more things to connect the dots. Example:
The coming collapse of not just the US dollar, but the entire banking system, where we are to see out money in baks dsappearing or being inacessible. There ill be bank runs across the planet. A new kind of mandemic is to be declared globally – the cyber pandemic, and everybody will be subject to severe control on expenditure.
Russia will be blamed for the pandemic, although Russia will have nothing to do with it and the crisis was either organic, since the banking was going to collapse on its own weight for creating too much fake money.
BRICS+ is seriously chaning the global balance of power. Ukraine and its importance, along with NATO, are all going to be less important.
US acknowdges defeat in Ukraine and stops funding it, and begins to pour money into Indo-pacific region to bolster AUstralian naval power to challenge, along with the US and UK the new global enemy – China.
Biden is asked to step down due to corruption charges. Kamala Harris becomes the short term president. She has no chance to win any election on her own, so the Democrats will not nominate her to lead the party in the next election, making her a lame duck with nothing to lose. She will, therefore, declare tha the US is pulling out of Ukraine, essentially conceding defeat.
New shift to Indo-Pacific under new alliance called AUKUS (Astralia+UK+US) will also mean US funding for new nuclear.subs and weaponry to be given to Australia will need huge funds, so Europe/NATO/Ukraine will stop receiving funds. This is the death knell for both Ukraine and Europe.
Role of India not properly undestood – this has remained under the radar till now. But world’s focus eventually will turn here. Will India compete with Russia for for the top spot as the Swing State. Indian Govt is tight lipped but appears to be very sane, level headed and not inclined to brag about whats going on. Watch India.
This is a carry over from my previous post, on connecting dots.
They say, writers get writer’s block, where they go into a phase when they cannot seem to write even a sentence. Well, I am not a professional writer, thankfully. But I often get into the opposite of a writers block. Too many different ideas, opinions and views crowd into me when I start writig. They jostle with eath other for my attention. One wants me to move this way, and write up about this issue. Another tugs me the oppsite way, reminding me not to ignore something else. I am being pulled in many directions to write about many different things that, together, helps connect the dots. Was I always like this? I know I was always full of questions and used to drive everybody nuts. Anyhow, now that I am busy connecting the dots, too many views crowd into my head and I try the filter through them to chose what I would write first and what next. In the process I end up explaining myself and my life as part of the story. Perhaps my life can help explain why I think the way I do. And by my life, I mean both the place and time that influenced my growing years, and the genes that I share with my parents and my siblings. Both my siblings – my younger brother and my elder sister, are no more. I am all alone on earth right now. But the urge to write continues … since this is such a complex world today, with so many dots moving in so many directions in so many different speeds in three dimension. My writers anti-block keeps pulling me differnt ways. Some of them pulls me to analyse how I grew up to be influenced by how many different things in how many ways, to have a mind set that makes me want to connect the current dots and to make sense. I never before had this feeling that the world is moving ever faster towards a combination of multiple kinds of doom.
Am I going nuts as a sign of senility creeping up or is this rational thinking that the world as we know it is going to vanish suddenly and that 21st century doomsday is nearly upon us, hanging like the sword of Damocles? I know the world medical ssytem has been working for multiple generatiosn now, slowly, to begin a system to make kankind sick for their entire lives, so everyone is a lifelong customer for the medical idustry. I know the new age moden agriculture is likewise trying to make agriculture dependent on acrocorporation products that makes our food sick, so we are permanently dependent on these industriess in order to eat. So our food and our health, has already been captured. What else is left. Well, there is about wealth. And finally, there is the planet, with everything on it. Am I delusional or am I being rational? I have the data to claim most of my suspicions.
But let us first go back to how I grew up, as one of the factors that influence my dot-plotting.
Thats me, two years old, and my year older sister. Far as I know, this is my earliest picture that has survived. My opinion and world view started being formed from this time.
Back to Facebook.
Odd as it may sound, I am now looking back at my life and same time being pulled towards toying with the idea of comparing our 22nd century mega social giants, such as Facebook and Google, as Black holes in our society and our subconscious. They are physically invisible, and yet, they are like an invisible parallel world that have gotten inside our psyche, and playing with our brains to shape the way we think. They are way more powerful than any drug or pill or jab invented by Big Pharma and they are eating our humanity from inside out.
It is a supergiant thingamajig that you can never see nor photograph nor visit, but is so huge that it literally bends, curves and convolutes the space around it and in a way defines our universe. Whether we can identify it, or not, is the thing. Today, I have come to the cross road where I wonder how my life’s journey took me from village India, to Facebook and how I now toy with the idea of comparing it with a Black Hole. But, how are we influenced by our movement through flow of the stream that we call life on earth?
Self went to inspect a ship in Hong Kong harbour in the 1990s,. I am standing between the British Captain and his wife. The captain was a friend, who asked me to bring my wife alone, so I did. She is standing next to the captain.
From those days and even earlier, from books we read, village drama we see at night on stage, or the chanting of religious or seasonal festivals – we have always been influeced by what we see and hear, to form out public opinion.
Public perception of life was being controlled by private enterprise for a while. Two generations ago, people use to say about Hollywood – There is no business like show business.
I remember the the details of first movie that I saw, in Kolkata, India, with my mother. It was a bengali movie, the title would translate as “Song of the road”. It was from 1955. It got a whole slew of national and international rewards and literally launched Indian cinema on the world stage, winning award after award across the planet, except in Hollywood. But decades later, its director, Satyajit Ray, in his last days on his death bed, earned a long distance lifetime achievement award by American motion picture award ceremony in Hollywood. The picture was a tale of the views around his world from the eyes of a very young kid, barely five or six year old, living in a very small village in an abjedtly poor (in comparison with the rest of the world) rural family. The family was leaving their ancestral village since they lost their mudhouse home. All their belongings were packed, occupying half of a single small bullock cart. The other half was the sleeping quarter for the father, mother and the boy. They finally came along a railway track. The boy had never seen a rail line or a train. He vividly recalls his dead elder sister, who had once asked if someone could please take her to see a train.
The movie – Song of the Road, in Bengali, was the first movie that I remember seeing, possibly at the age of six, that my mother took me to see. This movie left a vivid effect on it, till today.
Even today, as I remember how my mother held my hand and took me to the cinema hall, and how I gawked at the giant screen as the movie played out. I was myself perhaps six years old. I am now going to be 73 in a few months. Even today, the memory of it raises the hairs in my arms, the experience was so vivid and touching.
Santiniketan, India. This is where I was born, and attended school barefeet
Thus, my own world view has emerged and evolved with events throughout my life. The fact that I went through my school years withuot footwear, fact there I lived in a place where there were no junk on the street, when plastic was not invented and everything was naturally biodegradable, that my feet had little other than dust when I ame home, fact that we all had to wash our feet before entering – every bit of it influenced my world view as I grew up. I understand my views were markedly different from boys that grew up in cities in India. One could not and did not live the way I did. Nobody completes schools in cities without footwear. Even homelss street beggars have footwear.
But I was not quite poor, per say. Our expenses where way lower. The family income was way lower than in cities. We had no ceiling fan inside home. IN the heat of the summer when sleeping inside was a torture, we slept out in the open in our frant lawn. If it suddenly started raining at night, and Indian monsoon can be torrential, we woudl wake up, take our mattress, pillows and mosquitto net and run indoors. That was all very normal. Your life was in sync with nature. ANd I never got cold, or malaria, or any illness because of living close to nature.
This is how my life’s journey took me from Village India, to Facebook
Birbhum district, West Bengal, India – from days that are behind us now, but it was real when I was a kid.
That picture describes my neighbourhood surrrounding our small University townlet of Santiniketan in Bengal, India. Homes where mud walled. Roofs were of straw. Transport was on bullock cartsm made of bamboo, Wheels were at first wooden. But steel rims around fooden wheels made inside the village was entering the fray. And then wholly steel wheels, without tire, was the next step of self sustainability, where the money stayed in the village and did not go to city corporations and factories far away. Sustainability was not just a catch phrase. It was real and omnipresent. That was part of the essence of my childhood. But all that was already changing and at a breakneck speed. I did not realise it then, but my world was being put upside down, little by little, till it comes into multiple crisis at the same time.
I did not know it then, but the agents of such change, the horses of apocalypse, were both the rich and the poor, the left and the right, the corporations and the politicial parties. I did not know it till I was well into my senior years. I thought I knew much of the world when I was a teen and a post teen. But I can now say – I knew only the surface ripples of a very vast and deep system.
Me in the middle with my siblings. My younger brother at left and my elder sistem, wearing colour, at right. It was at the Santiniketan version of the Holi festival, of Vasanta Utsav, which translates as Spring Festival. Today I am the only one alive.
Fast forward a tumultuous phase of decade after decade of growing up, studying and epansion of our horizon, for good and bad, till I ended up living in Hong Kong just before the turn of the millennia and internet came to the world. Hong Kong was very advanced compared in the early and mid 1990s, to most western regions, and dial up internet came to my home, when Apple computers, Macintoshes, were ahead of the Microsoft PCs to embrace internet and recognise it as what it was soon going to be. Bill Gates caught on soon enough and made a total about turn, covertig the entire PC industry into an internet promoting enterprise.
Soon I was to leave Hong Kong, as the free wheeling and near tax free British Colony was going to be handed over to Communist China and there was fear that the place was going to change and non-chinese people might be kicked out. A huge exodus started out of Hong Kong. Industries, banks and people started moving out. Head hunters from around the world set up offices and channels to catch entrepreneurs, skilled people and industries, to help them resettle in various parts of the west. Kiosks, fairs and shows started coming up in Parks on weekends in Hong Kong, from various such sources. Even the Governments of Canada and USA were organising picnics, shows and taking up Booths in cultural fairs, to attract potential immigrants. It was quite a show. I had not decided to leave initially, but eventually I too got swept in the tide, when a ship owning firm in Miami, Florida, gave me a call and offered me a 7 days free of charge vacation to Miami, if I agree to an interview by the CEO, for a potential job as an executive. No kidding.
And my life changed. However, I was alreay well into the internet, thanks to Hong Kong. I even managed to change my own web page and sight, with a new account from a service provider in Miami, paying for it with my newly acquired credit card linked to a Hong Kong bank, and shifted my web home page there, with a hotlink to my existing Hong Kong based web page. It was all very exciting those days and I was pleased that I could do all that with relative ease, while most of my friends still did not much know what the heck internet was.
Fast forward a few decades and I was then in Canada and first got interest in a host of new social media platforms cropping up everywhere. Facebook was one of them. There were many others and the competition was fierce. Internet connection was by then moved on from telephone dial in, to broadband, in the US where I lived for some years, to Canada, where I migrated to. I have forgotten some of the other platforms, but eventually estabished myself on Facebook, primarily as it was here that I could communicate with the townspeople from my birth place – Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. There it was still dial up, but local system providers where getting busy hooking people up with dial up modems etc. I think broadband lines were still into the future. Those were the heady days.
Today, I have almost nobody in my home town that communicate with me. Many have passed away. Others have drifted away. Some have separated frm me on ideological differences.
Tagore
You see, internet has been, same time, a great uniter and a great divider. WHen you do not get to hear or read too much from your friends, do you not know too much of his or her world views and ideological bend. So friendship remains stable, though superficial. As internet broadens the communication channels and people spend more time expressing themselves, sometimes fissures come up. For me, life has been a great educator, and I have always had an open and questioning mind, not anchored on any ideology. Nothing was ever written in stone for me. Not religion, not phylosophy, not political affiliation – not nothing. Everything was worth exploring, worth admiring for its good points and criticising for what I considered its bad points. I was perhaps more influenced by my genes, my parents and the only person who greatly influenced my world view – Tagore.
So, I was once a socialist, then a progressive, a liberal, a secularist, then an ism-less humanist, then promoter of small entrepreneurs (I even started a trading company myself in Hong Kong, before realising I was not a businessman at heart, and closed it down after a few years, but not before I had made a few thousand bucks, involved in breaking of ships in western India, through links in Hong Kong, and paid in US dollars). But most of my birth place friends were anchored in stone. Eventually we fell apart.
Things have now come to a head and I have started detesting some of my friends. A young classmate from my school days, who ended up being a professon in a famous Univerity in Delhi, even psoted to me on Facebook that – I was endangerign mankind by refusing to wear a mask and hugging people everywhere and mising with them. I was such a threat to mankind that he was going to report me to the Canadian police, so I would spend my remaining days in jail, and save mankind in the process. No, he was not a mad man. He was a profession in a shiny famous University in the Capital city of India. So much for professors. Suffice it to say, I had by then learned how to block people.
So, my link with the leftist, or left leaning crowd of my own past, drifted apart from me. I myself, through life experiences had leared that some people were too block headed for my taste and childhood friendship was not enough to stay in touch if I was not allowed to speak my mind of items that I thought were ruining the planet, and that neither the left wing, nor the right wing, were honest or path finders.
Eventually, rather late in life, I began to understand how social media like Facebook, Google search and other stuff, where actively engaged in altering public opinion of the entire planet, and have more power to control people, than national governments, and how they were seriously trifling with free flow of information and exploration of the mind.
I have also been aware how some of these corporations have acquired unebelievable power over the people, though mind control, or through stifling opposition, and by having enough money to buy up governments, of not just small countries. There is now a famous joke in America – USA is the best governemnt in the world that money can buy.
And so I engaged in a multiple year effort to get away from, and wean people I like, away from the clutches of Facebook. I have mostly failed in my effort. But that is okay with me. It is not so much the result, but the effort, that makes life worth living, for me. Besides I have largely been a lone ranger in my activism that stretches decades well into my teen years in India. I have rarely ben happy joining any big group, for all sorts of reasons. Mostly I found these group leaders, including political leaders, lacking in ethics and for being in it more for themselves, than for any root social issue.
MeWe was another example of my failed efforts. It looks and behaves similar to facebook. In my judgment, opening a second house on MeWe should be least painful for Facebookians. I tried my best to enourage people to move there. Why? Because Facebook seriously and viciously restricts free speech when it comes to certain burnig topics of the world today, and MeWe does not. That alone should be enough for people that are aware of it and are actually engaged day and night criticising Facebook and Zuckerberg, to move there. But I failed in my effort. I now know more about the Artificial Intelligence tools that Zucherberg uses to keep people hooked and unable to leave FB. I admire Zuckerberg for his smartness and detest him for his efforts to guide and shape global public opinion.
But, Zuckerberg is not the guy I have to live with. I am that guy I have to live with. So, my effort on MeWe, as well as others, continue. I have succssfully boycotted Youtube without cancelling my unpaid membership. I have largely transported by recent stuff out of Facebook and on to other channels and platforms. MeWe is one of them. And here is what I have to show for it.
I have only a few hundred friends, who almost never respond or comment on any of my posts, and never generate any conversation that can amount to a conversation.
Do I get that in Facebook ? Not quite. If you have 5,000 friends, over 10,000 followers and another thousand wanting to be my friends – thats a total of 16,000 or so. And then I get less than one meaningful conversation a day on life altering events going on around the world. Sure, lots of folks are busy making small protests nearby on some of these issues. But I can see that virtual protets on the same Facebook that is cleverly engaged in controlling public opinion and acting as a super controlled-Opposition promoter.
But facebook too has been an useful tool for me in my last years. it is a reasonable rough diary, to hone my writing skills. this helps my brain to remain active. Brain is after all the largest and most fuel consuming organ of the body. exercising the brain as as strenuous as running several rounds around my block, but for keeoing differnt parts of my body healthy.
I have always been reasonably healthy. I do not take any jab – not in last 65 years. I never get an infection. My medical bill has been zero for the lat forty or more years. And, thankfully, my brain is still active and my fingers are still nimble enough for me to be baning keyboards to try my writing skills.
Examples of my failed attemps on Facebook to find answers and develop a dialog. I did not know, even three years ago, that Facebook was exactly the wrong platform for this.
So, MeWe and the rest are not necessarily examples of my failure. I have often, and repeatedly, failed in my efforts to engage socially about issues that matter to us socially. But for me, these failed activities were still memorable. These are proofs of an active mind that does not like to give up easily. And I have found a good use for Facebook – a rough diary.
Here is how similar my home page on MeWe looks like my FB page. I think I need to change my profile picture. I instinctively dislike hiding myself behind phony nakes or pictures while socialising. And I like the idea of wrapping text around my picture to express my opinion. I was born opinionated.
The world is constantly inching towards the end of the cliff. The Ukraine war has become toe focal point of a very large set of global issues that is tearing the estabished fabric of global systems apart. A new system is poking its head out of the fractured shell of the egg. It is not at all certain if the transition from the US controlled unipolar hegemonic petrodollar linked world economic system to a yet unidentified multipolar system is going to be peaceful or violent. All the tell tale signs are there.
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At one end of the Ukraine imbroglio stands Russia. In the eyes of the western propaganda driven, virtual world citizens of the west – Russia is the greatest bully and a rogue and a crimina invader of an innocent, peace loving Ukraine without any provocation. But in the eyes of those that keep their eyes, ears and minds open, Russia is noen of those things and the US is the greatest instigator and architect of this fame narrative. He has out Sovieted the Soviets of the past and out Propaganda-ed the Soviets too. The lies are so blatact, so omniprent, so unbelievably stupid and stifling, that one has to be a near retard to beleive it all. The lies started a long long time ago and continues to this day. So, for the people awake, Russia is being singled out as the villane on one side of the conflict, with a clear intend to bury it permanently, never to emerge again.
But on the other side, unlike the propaganda narrative, is not Ukraine, which is just a proxy tool and an intended sacrificial lamb, too stupid to understand what is good for it, and controlled by the most corrupt regime on the face of this planet. No, Ukraine is most certainly not on the other end of the conflict. It is the US, the agent provocateur par excellence. Along with the US, is all the nations that hang on to the coat tails of USA. That includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and all EU/NATO nations of Europe. And, just for variety, you may also add Japan, the only non-white nation into the mix. That is what Russia is facing single handedly, on false charges.
MODI + PUTIN
But then, there is also the non-west nations of the earth, comprising of 85% of the world population. And there is BRICS+. and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. There is China, and then there is India. All of them carry significant amount of geopolitical, economic and demographic punch. It is getting increasingly well understood by the world, that there are more than just one block (the west) on earth. And the emerging nations are not particular fond of the west, reembering well the centuries of direct colonisation and subseqquent hidden colonisation ongois ng till today.
India has been playing a tightrope walk for the last one year. Initially they utright refused to sanction Russia and even said how it is dangerous for their national interest to cut trade links with Russia. However, the things turned around rapidly for India.
In jiffy, India managed to secure discounted assurance of Russian Crude oil that the west sanctioned itself out of. Then India proceeded to refine the oil in India, at a rate higher than India’s own consumption. India started filling up its own strategic reserve on one side, and started selling the refined oil on the other side. USA and Europe started importing the refined oil, originally from Russia but repackaged through India. Strangely, this was acceptable to the western sanction regimes. Net result was, India became the worlds third largest oil importer on one side, and a huge refined oil supplier to the west on the other. For reasons such as this, the US seem to have moved on to a coy mode. Its politicians seem not too keen to scold India any more, for continuing to trade with Russia. A few Indian video content creator such as Amit Sengupta started covering such stories on Youtube. One is tempted to say – politics makes strange bedfellows.
So is things going great for Russia? Well, in my mind, there are still unanswered questions. One of them have been why is it so fard to find a Russia loving Russian that is not afraid to speak with me about his views of how his homeland is being targetted, unfairly, by the entire west. I have been looking for such a person for a year now. And although there are over 150 million Russians, I have found only one so far. Everybody else is commenting on the english medium social media, or on podcasts and video, but I cannot find a single Russian to speak on record with.
Who are the good Russians? Who are the bad ones? Why are most of them reluctant to speak on camera ? WHat are they afraid of? Why are they hesitating? My search continues, but I by now have a few suspicions.
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Author – Tony Mitra
Dentists and Russia
There used to be a joke in my younger years, about dentists in Soviet Union. The joke was – the hardest profession in Soviet Union was that of a dentist – because nobody wants to open his or her mouth. It was a jpke then. But I am beginning to suspect that this is not a joke any more, in present Russia. And there must be a rather strange or sinister reason.
I have been told that Russia is full of internally implanted sppies, Putin-haters and agent provocateurs, apart from an already exising (illegal) Government in exile. The internal colaborators of the US hegemon are at all layers of Government, and the courts or the banks and on social media. The reason is long and complicaed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the corrupt Russians came to Boris Yeltsin’s group like flies to a jar of honey.
Boris apparently helped create the class of looters that tried to drain Russian resources dry, and became billionnaires overnight. Yeltsin reaslised the mistake and also got afraid that he was going to end his life being hanged or in jail and that his daughter and son in law too would face the gallows. He tried to right the ship by offering to step down and help elevate the right guy that can steady the floundering Russian ship, but same time spare him and his family. As the story goes, Yestsiin found nobody around him capable enough, except Putin.
To cut a long story, Putin kept his promise, let Yeltsin spend his last years in peace, stopped the national loot and told the instant billionnaires – so far and no further. You can keep your wealth, but the loot stops now.
Thus, the crooks remained. Over the years, most of them have now left Russia and taken their cash with them. The owner of Telegram is one such – Pavel Durov, now reportedly a resident of Dubai, is a good example. He is apparently a highly controvertial person, and suspected to be somewhat anti-Putin. Is that because Putin stopped the instant Billionnaires from continuing to loot Russia, or because he refuses to be bought any more?
Some Russians tell me, this man is not straight and he is not exactly a Russia lover. But a lot of activists and such are on his Telegram channel. I myself have found it hard to find an honest Russian to agree to speak with me on record, through huge list of channels on Telegram that are supposedly frequented by Russians. I even had a few Russian speaking friends to post in Russian language to seek a Russia loving Russian to speak freely and without fear to me on record. I have been disappointed in the result initially, because I was not aware of what was gonig on there. No takers of the offer to speak with me so far, except just one Russian woman about six months ago – Ms Irina Muhina. First part of her interview is below. I could not fathom why I am not getting people ready and happy to speak to me. Language was one problem but I did not believe at all that this was the main problem. It took me some time to understand that there are layers of other issues that are likely making some Russians nervous and who to talk to freely. One of the cause of this nervousness, I suspect, is because there is an internal quiet revolution gonig on in Russia, involving house cleaning. Some believe the globalists are slowly filtering out of Russia and taking their assets with him. The west cutting Russia out of the SWIFT system might have triggered an avalanche. I would love to hear more of it from Russia, but do not get much clear talk from Russians. Many are too shy to speak from within Russia. Many more Russians outside of Russia have divided loyalties and confused notions. Many east Europeans carry historical grudge against Russia and many Russians are aware of that and do not wish to speak up. This is a mine field in itself.
That was a few months ago. By now I have spent more than a year looking for honest Russians that do not hate Russia nor Putin and understands the root causes behind the conflict and willing to speak without fear.
The paucity of available Russians, and the rumour that inside Russia, the agent provocateurs are now on the run, and many are slowly exiting Russia. Some congregating around Georgia while others are gravitating towards greener pasteurs such as Canada. I wonder when we are going to have a Stephan Bendera statue here in Canada. Bandera, long dead now, is the celebrated Nazi of Ukraine and Nazis appear to be the new darlings of the west.
I need further confirmation on why I have a hard time finding people in Russia to speak with me. Many agree at first, and then shy away for one reason or another. Some do a partial interview but find excuse to avoid the others, such as sudden fever and illness or too busy to talk face to face or downright hostile and arrogant. I have a sneaky suspecion that these do not love Russia, nor Putin and somehow are playing for the US to destroy Russia, at which time they plan to somehow benefit from it. I also have a sneaky feeling that the good Russians might be aware of what is going on, but do not fully know who is a good guy and who is not, or something. They are therefore more careful and hesitant about exposing themselves, and would rather wait to see if Putin manages to sweep his house clean, or the old Obama plants and left over crooks in Russia manage to bury Putin as well as Russia, and let the US regain its Unipolar global bully status. This is of course, just a hunch.
Facebook is a lot bigger than just a dot – it is a black hole
Connecting the dots in a major puzzle needs most of the dots to be identified and plotted. I have now come to realise that Facebook, along with some others, are dots that just cannot be ignored. When it comes to passing information and shaping public opinion, it is my view that Facebook represents a gigantic dot. This dot is as large as a black hole. Black holes in space are supergiant masses that have so much grvitational pull that even photons, or particles of light that have a miniscule weight but travelling at the speed of light, cannot escape its pull if they pass too close to these guys. What happpens is light too falls into this giant vacuum cleaner and can never excape. No matter how much explosive activity is going on inside that mega-star, no light and no nothing from it can escape its unbelievable gravitational pull, hence the name – Black Hole. Even light that passes near it without getting too close, is bent in its path due to the gravitation. This is one way Einstein to explain how the space as we understand it, is a matrix that is curved by the matter around it etc.
Back to our virtual world – you need to identify and plot the dots on the map before you can connect them. And Facebook, in the current human tapetry, is not just an important dot that is far more important, far larger, than just a dot. it is a virtual black hole.
If you are smart, you may indirectly guess its existence by its absence and how it bends space around it and how its extreme gravitational pull does not allow even particles of visible light, called photon, to escape. That is why it is invisible – even light is unable to escape a black hole. Thus the name – black hole. It is neither a hole, nor black. To be continued ….
We are living in an unbelievable time of change. It may be impossible to grasp all of it by anybody living on earth currently, because so much of it is happening in so many different levels in so many places simultaneously. The collective outcome is likely to change the way we live, think and exist, in so many profound way. And all this is happening so fast that it can make your head spin.
We all know, unless one is brain dead, that the Ukraine conflict is an extremely small tip of an extremely large iceberg, and that too much of the details are underwater and invisible.
A love letter from Zuckerberg
Take Facebook for example. It has only recently helped me understand the extent to which globalist’s control of social media can help manufacturing or shape public opinion. Facebook is an example par excellence. Most people do not even know that half the worlds population are Facebook members. If you account for the fact that the other half could be children, too old to care, or folks that aer poor do not have internet, then you can guess that nearly 100% of the connected mankind of the entire planet are Facebook members. Now, consider that Facebook unilaterally and illegally applies extra-ordinary levels of control and censorship on your use of certain opinions relating to certain globalist programs, such as on Covid19 pandemic or vaccine, for example. This control, on 100% of the internet connected humanity of the world, helps controlling how the world perceives as public opinion, which has been illegally manipulated to favour whichever God Zuckerberg prays to. You have been suckered. This may help you to begin to understand, if you are capable of analysing anything independently, how you are being suckered, not as a prank, but on issues that can make or break the current state of humanity.
This is one reason I am constantly moving away from Fake-book and am determined to eventually leave behind all my thousands and thousands of friends, followers and other contacts here. Even half the population of the planet is not good enough for me to stay in a cage where I cannot speak what I consider to be of a life-and-death importance for mankind. I am not a messiah, but I was born free and wish to die free.
Zuckerberg
Anyway, enough of Zukerberg and his hold on Facebook, and Instagram as well as WhatsApp through Meta.
I write this particular piece as a blog to get back into the habit of promoting my blog. But the world is changing so fast, that writing a blog is for the freaks. Everybody talks into a phone camera and shares it on tiktok or instagram for their half a second of passing fame. That is what is trending. Writing anything in a blog is prehistoric.
The thing is, I am going to be 73 years old in a few months. I myself will be compared to the dinosaurs by the new generation, which might be generation X,Y,Z or perhaps new style non-latin scripts such as µ, ß,å, ≈, ≥ etc. But, I am still for writing, though even a saurid like myself have transitioned from writing by hand into a diary, to typing on a typewriter, to punching keys on a computer. I made a stop there and have not transitioned to two finger tying on a smart phone. Even a saurid can dra a line.
And that is not all. I am opinionated and do not shy away from saying what I feel, even in english, complete with my Indian accent, which I refuse to let go. I was born with it and grew up in it. I have made near 1000 videos, half of them on YouTube before I started boycotting it for the same reason I am slowply boycotting Facebook – they too censor public opinion and freedom of speech that I do not agree with, and pretty much for the same reason – blocking all dessenting voice on Covid19 and its vaccines. WHO is the God. Bill Gates is the prophet. And anybody that disagrees will be banished from YouTube. Hence, my polite address to Youtube would be – F*CK YOU.
And so, I have never ever been as busy as I am these days, trying to catch up with the fast changing world while staying away from all main stream and most of the privately controlled social media. Searchign for honest news has gotten harder than finding God. Yes, we are living in an incredibly unexplainable phase on the planetary history in the age of Anthropocene. If you never heard of the age of Anthropocene, I suggest you research it. It will be a very relevant education on the current geological time.
Pepe Escobar
Pepe Escobar
It is time people like myself begin to forget people like Zuckerberg and focus more on people like Pepe Escobar. Who is this man? Well, yes, he is a man. You gotta be careful about gender in this newfound western discovery of the cancel culture. First, there was Copernicus who found that the earth is far from being the centre of the universe. And then came the neocons, the neolibs and the neo-whatever to invent the cancel culture. Whatever you thought of anything, is wrong. A man is not a man, a woman not a woman, and we all need to hate ourselves for being born whichever way we were born.
Back to Pepe. He is a man, period. From his name, you might guess that he was nor born in any Anglo-Saxon family and perhaps belongs to the Hispanic diaspora. Actually, Spanish is not his mother tongue, I suspect. But Portuguese might be, since he was born in Brasil.
Pepe Escobar is a reporter and columnist. He has been an editor-at-large at Asia Times and an independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia. For over 40 years, he has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in various places across the planet such as London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore and Bangkok. Perhaps the only continents he has not lived in for work are Latin America, Africa, and Antarctica.
He is the author of countless books; his latest one is Raging Twenties, with subtitles stating – “Great Power Politics Meets Techno-Feudalism”. You get the picture?
Well, Pepe recently wrote an article in the Cradle. If you have no idea who or what is “Cradle” – itdescribes itself as “The Cradle is a journalist-driven media platform that provides in depth coverage and analysis of West Asian geopolitics from within the region.”
Comprende ? Pepe seems to be gravitating towards the non-west, or dare I say – Global South?
Anyhow, the article that Pepe wrote recently, in the heat of the Ukraine battle, is titled: Global South: Gold-backed currencies to replace the US dollar.
The article starts with:
Let’s start with three interconnected multipolar-driven facts.
First: One of the key take aways from the World Economic Forum annual shindig in Davos, Switzerland is when Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan, on a panel on “Saudi Arabia’s Transformation,” made it clear that Riyadh “will consider trading in currencies other than the US dollar.”
Second: The Central Banks of Iran and Russia are studying the adoption of a “stable coin” for foreign trade settlements, replacing the US dollar, with the ruble and the rial. The crypto crowd is already up in arms, mulling the pros and cons of a gold-backed central bank digital currency (CBDC) for trade that will be in fact impervious to the weaponized US dollar.
Third: South Africa holds this year’s rotating BRICS presidency. And this year will mark the start of BRICS+ expansion, with candidates ranging from Algeria, Iran and Argentina to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Author – Tony Mitra
This is huge and may be difficult to comprehend properly by the current generation of people. The Petrodollar dependence in global trade is fifty years old. Very few people even remember how the world was when currencies used to be linked to gold or other commodities. Fiat currency, printed out of thin air, or created out of the click of a mouse is the norm today. Even that mouse has disappeared, replace by a button or a touch pad. The very meaning of money, or wealth, or savings, have become incredibly complex to properly understand. But here and now, the global South is beginning to do something about it.
Try to understand, and comprehend the enormity of the decision, if you can.
The very of financial system behind the global economy and commerce, are going to change, significantly. Its heart is being taken out and replaced. And the donor is not from the west. There is almost zero western input into this work. The western economic henchmen are little more than curious onlookers that are not invited to join the party. If you do not believe this is big, then you and I have different interpretation of “big”.
Try to grasp the enormity of it, and see if you can connect any dots with the current Ukraine conflict? One of the two adversaries, Russia is with the Global South, while the other, NATO is not. Also, the core that triggered all this, and whose work started long before the Russian soldiers walked into Ukraine, is BRICS, and the person that made BRICS happen, is Putin, or Russia. It started with RIC – Russia India China. Then Brasil and South Africa joined up and made it BRICS. Then many more want to enter, so it is now called BRICS+. But it was Putin & Russia, that made it happen. And the same Russia, is one of the warring parties in the current proxy war.
Connect the dots?
India: here is another country that is mostly out of spotlight, but I believe, is playing a major and ground breaking role. More on this later, perhaps. Now is not the time to talk about India. Meanwhile consider just the following paragraph also penned by Pepe in that article:
India’s purchases of Russian crude have increased year-by-year by a whopping factor of 33. India is the world’s third largest importer of oil; in December, it received 1.2 million barrels from Russia, which for several months now is positioned ahead of Iraq and Saudi Arabia as Delhi’s top supplier.
3300% jump in oil import from Russia in a single year, concurrent with the West’s imposition of total sanction agaisnt Russia. Now remember, India is among the most populous nation on earth, at par with China, having 1.4 billion people, and are on a fast rising economic path, among the fastest in the world, often ahead of the Chinese growth rate. India started a generation late into the sprint to the top, and is significantly behind the Chinese GDP as of now but threatening to catch up with both USA and China is a decade or two, leaving the rest of the world very far behind. Thsi is assuming that USA retains its economic might – which I now suspect might be impossible, and USA is eventually following Europe, into economic irrelevance. We shall see, though I myself will not be around, unless I can live past a hundred.
Anyhow, the current growth in India and also China means – a huge swath of human population are going to be as individually rich as the rest of the west. And when you multiply this with the population to measure the national wealth, these nations may have three, four, or ten times the economic clout of the combined west. China and India by themselves are about half the world population. Therefore, if people of these two nations become, man for man, as rich as Americans, this means these two countries together will have several times more economic clout than the rest of the world put together. And then you start adding all the other emerging economies of the non-west. Try to draw the picture of the world a generation from now.
This rest of the non-west is already an economic power block that is not with the west regardig Ukraine. This block, with their own rise in economies and vast resource base, along with Russia the riches resource base on earth, plus China and India are forming this new BRICS+ arrangement wanting to get away from Petrodollar dominance. So – where is the world heading?
Sit down, have a coffee and think about it. This is not a hypothetical mid-summer night’s dream. This is real, this is happening right now and at a breakneck speed.
Now let us go back to Pepe. How did the term R5+ come up instead of BRICS+. Well, we are here talking about currencies and not nations. The “R” comes from an intriguing side note. The currencies of the current BRICS nations all start with R – Real, Ruble, Rupee, Remnimbi, Rand. Thus – R5. And R5+ simply means other currencies of the member state too.
As it happens in the emerging market nations, these currencies, especially Remnembi, Rupee and Ruble are the most liquid.
Then comes two names that you might consider following up, who add value to the depolarisation effort of the Global South – Zoltan Pozsar and Sergey Glazyev. The first is an American and the second is a Russian.
Zoltan Pozsar is the American born Global Head of Short- Term Interest Rate Strategy department of Credit Suisse. And Credit Suisse Group AG is a global investment bank and financial services firm founded and based in Switzerland. Also, he formerly was in the IMF, US Department of Treasury, and New York Federal Reserve.
Zoltar wrote two recent articles that have become highly controversial and disliked by the western world – “War and Commodity Encumbrance”, and “War and Currency Statecraft” where he writes about how the war in Ukraine is creating new financial channels.
Zoltan Pozsar
He is also a committed supporter of Bretton Woods III – an idea that has been getting enormous traction among the Fed-skeptical crowd. If you do not know what Bretton Woods is, it may be time that you brush up a bit. The Bretton Woods is a system of monetary management that established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. Bretton Woods III is just a name given to a recent reincarnation of it, proposed by, yes, Zoltar Pozsar, based on a commodity based currency – something that the Global South is proposing and working on, in order to get away from the US dominated Petrodollar and the US hegemony promoting banking systems. What the inner goals of Bretton Woods III is, and if it supports a backdoor takeover by the west,like a trojan horse, or a genuine wish to join the new club as an equal member, I do not know, since I am just a retired marine engineer and not an pretend economic expert.
Sergey Glazyev
Meanwhile the Russian counter part, Sergey Glazyev is the Minister of the Eurasia Economic Commission (EAEU). Yes, there is an Eurasian Economic Commission and yes, there is a Minister, and that person is Russian at the moment.
But who is Sergey Glazyev? Well, for a start – he was born in 1961, (11 years younger than me), but in a very interesting place – Zaporozhye. Yes, the same place where Russia is right now battling Ukraine in the region known as DPR, or Donetsk People’s Republic, in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. That’s right.
But that is not all.
In 1983, he graduated from Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov, majoring in Economic Cybernetics. This man is also a Russian politician and economist, member of the National Financial Council of the Bank of Russia, and, since 2008, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Glazyev was minister of Foreign Economic Relations in Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet from 1992 to 1993, a member of the State Duma from 1993 to 2007, one of the leaders of the electoral block Rodina from 2003 to 2004, a candidate for the Presidency of the Russian Federation in 2004, and advisor to the president of the Russian Federation on regional economic integration from 2012 to 2019. As of 2021, he is the Commissioner for Integration and Macroeconomics within the Eurasian Economic Commission, the executive body of the Eurasian Economic Union. That is who he is.
Collapse of the dollar – BRICS in focus?
But it is difficult to write about connecting the dots on the fast moving geopolitical chess board without mentioining a bit more of the dedollarisation phenomenon. An impending collapse of the US dollar as the world reserve currency and the currency that all developped and developing nation must accumulate in ever larger quantity, in order to trade and purchase ever increasing demand for oil – is a near certainty, and a serious contributory reason for the US beginning to lose sleep over it.
Understanding it is equally challenging since it requires the reader to reject long held notions about many things economical, such as fiat currency, the root of the American wealth, and continuous global wars mostly instigated by the US, al because of the never emptying well of dollars and more dollats printed out of this air for benefit of the US but picked up by everybody else. But that gravy train is about to derail itself as an immovable object is noted on its track – BRICS.
An ever growing block of nations, cmprising of more than perhaps 3/4th of mankind, does not like the US hegemonic hold on the globe based on its dollarised economy. These people want freedom from US and dollar dependence. And BRICS appears to be the best vehicle to date, that can bring this freedom. If you like, listen to this 53 minute video. It may prove eye eopening for the uninitiated, about how a natural calamity – collapse of the dollar because it is too top heavy, can be used to pin another blame on Russia – in the form of Cyber hacking terrorism that causes all banks to fail. This is most likely in the plans. Is this an excuse to initiate a nuclear exchange to punish and dismember Russia? Are there many layers of Agent Provocateurs
These two persons, diametrically opposite in the geopolitical global matrix, are strangely, talking in similar lines and even mentioning each other. Some of Zoltar’s highly controversial articles are as recent as the last week of December 2022 – three weeks ago from my writing.
Pepe Escobar thinks, with good reason, that Zoltar and Sergei – from opposing poles, are converging. I believe this convergence might actually be a western Trojan horse, or an indication that the Geopolitical shift in balance of power is real, and that the west is getting scared out of its wits and scrambling to adapt, while different corners are breaking away and splintering from the main unified body.
Click on the picture to read the full text
According to Pepe, what Glazyev proposes now is for Russia to boost gold mining to as much as 3 percent of GDP: the basis for fast growth of the entire commodity sector (30 percent of Russian GDP). With the country becoming a world leader in gold production, it gets “a strong ruble, a strong budget and a strong economy.”
You can guess, that Sergei is not an idiot, and that Putin is beginning to get a good team of colonels to fight the rest of the west off.
This, the financial shift in the centre of gravity of the planet, has many very astute players. Pepe’s article on the new commodity based currency system being worked out of the Global South, with BRICS+ or R5+ members are a very big thing, the biggest thing to happen to this planet since the second world war, and that it is literally turning the old hegemonic west-controlled system and the global balance of power on its head.
And most people that still clings to the western idea that West is the only representative of honesty, rule of law, fairness in trade and economics, and also the only super power – are all to be proven wrong.
Click on the picture to read the second paper from Zoltan Pozsar
My view is – this economic stuff is just one angle of a very large puzzle. Ukraine is just one, very small and visible tip of a super gigantic iceberg that we shall likely need a long time to understand, or accept in our minds. But the iceberg is here, and the change in balance of power is real and present, and the BOOK is to be re-written, is right now being re-written, by people and countries that took absolutely no part in compposing the previous edition. The writers of the current edition are not linked with NATO or the west, or even Japan, the pseudo-west.
But, what do I know? I am just an uneducated marine engineer who does not understand either geopolitics, or finance.
If you have an opinion or a comment, I encourage you to use the below comment box and write something that helps stimulate human communication and exchange of ideas.
