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.

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.

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

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” – it  describes 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you.