[John Day]

@ Mr. House: “Without Russian Involvement” is the key term here:

‘Golden Ruble’: Russian Think-Tank Proposes Stablecoin To Overcome Western Sanctions
..The measure is supposed to protect the golden ruble from US-led attempts to undermine its trading properties and value.
While it is not clear if the proposed coin will be convertible to the precious metal – a practice long abandoned by most fiat monies -, the VEB.RF noted that the golden ruble would be specifically designed for international trade and not intra-state use.
Furthermore, it should be tradable by third countries without Russian involvement.
https://sputniknews.com/20220622/golden-ruble-russian-think-tank-proposes-stablecoin-to-overcome-western-sanctions–1096572076.html

[John Day]

“Over 3 tons” of Russian gold moved into Switzerland in May and nobody claims responsibility.
None of the big bullion dealers bought it…
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-06-23/when-gold-just-gold-russian-gold-back-favour

Wassup?
The article above talks about Russia putting it there as collateral for a loan, like a trad-guaranty with India for some really big purchase, but the article does not mention that it could be deposited in Switzerland for the coming-out party of “The Golden Ruble”.
It could.
It might be that… It’s got my attention.

[John Day]

@FS: Justin(e) Trudeau may be scoring own-goals and yet remaining oblivious in a seductively reinforcing narcissistic-bubble.

This might be ok, just fine…

[John Day]

I’m not sure that Congress should enact legislation regarding access to medical procedures, b ut it is a better venue than the Supreme Court.
This is a fundamentally stressful and inherently unfair-to-somebody issue.

[John Day]

@Zerosum: I’m pretty certain that in Texas Vladimir Putin is a “white guy”, though not a “good-ole-boy”, though he could be in time, if he lived here and did right…

[John Day]

Last night WES quoth: “Joe isn’t too worried about the November 2022 mid-term elections.
The federal government has taken active control of all state election commissions.
In November Americans will find this out.
But it will be too late to do anything about it.”

It’s all the rage this morning, too, due to that story Ilargi posted.

Another Civil War? I’m not being facetious.
Texas has a gold depository. This story from last year says it may lose money. What I hear from a friend with inside-knowledge is that the New York Fed is making excuses and won’t let Texas have her gold bullion.
Remember DeGaulle getting France’s gold until there was no more to be gotten? Everybody remembers that.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/The-Texas-Bullion-Depository-sold-as-a-gold-mine-16416032.php
“The University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Co., which handles the schools’ endowment, owned hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gold as an investment, stored for a fee in a New York City vault. A state-owned depository “will repatriate $1 billion of gold bullion from the Federal Reserve in New York to Texas,” Gov. Greg Abbott said.”

I have been musing about capitulations in history recently. There must be complete emotional capitulation by those who make decisions before a corrupted and broken system can be discarded and a new, more functional system can be constructed from the ground up, which is how functional systems are constructed, from the functional end first, not the elite-executive suites.

NOBODY appears to feel the despair yet. Nobody sees capitulation as an option yet.
How can this play out?

I have been expecting attempts to create artificial-bottoms, artificial capitulations, and then drive the human dynamic into another bull-market, like after March 2020 stock market crash.
I have considered that the midterm-elections could be such a false-bottom, and there could be a handover to “the new boss, same as the old boss”, like Trump in 2024.
This would continue the same system, with some adjustments and house-cleaning, so all the “stakeholders” could be assured of renewed faith while theings stayed similar for their ownership interests.

I have thought that such a ruse would not possibly work to create a real bottom, but the temptation to try it must be high.

The temptation to double-down again is bound to be higher, as the federal-vote-rigging story points out. It federal vote rigging fails, then maybe a false-capitulation and handover of the reins to the Republicant party could get “laigs” as we call them here. That seems like a stretch.

It seems more likely that there will be fractionation. the Texas Republicant party also voted a Succession-referendum into their platform. Big-Talk as usual, but a flash-point may be reached.
I’m actually seeing a lot of signs that Texas breaking away could work. Who would join Texas? The whole Gulf-Coast, including Florida? Oklahoma? New Mexico? Colorado?
Prob’ly not all of them, right? NASA likes Texas a lot. Texas Likes Musk a lot.

Can Texas erect immigration barriers to Chicago? You can’t come here if you don’t have a job?
Just musing. No answers. Fog of war. Being in history unfolding is different from studying the past.

[John Day]

So , so much COVID (bad) cat out of the bag news here:
https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/competing-paradigms

[John Day]

​ ​Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that banks from BRICS nations can freely connect to the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), Russia’s alternative to SWIFT.
​ ​While addressing a BRICS business forum, Putin said that together with its BRICS partners – Brazil, India, China and South Africa – Russia is developing reliable alternatives for international payments.
​ ​“The Russian system for transmitting financial messages is open to connecting banks from the five countries,” he said, adding: “The geography of the use of the Russian payment system Mir is expanding.”
https://www.rt.com/business/557620-russian-financial-messenger-brics/

‘Golden Ruble’: Russian Think-Tank Proposes Stablecoin To Overcome Western Sanctions
..The measure is supposed to protect the golden ruble from US-led attempts to undermine its trading properties and value.
While it is not clear if the proposed coin will be convertible to the precious metal – a practice long abandoned by most fiat monies -, the VEB.RF noted that the golden ruble would be specifically designed for international trade and not intra-state use.
Furthermore, it should be tradable by third countries without Russian involvement.
https://sputniknews.com/20220622/golden-ruble-russian-think-tank-proposes-stablecoin-to-overcome-western-sanctions–1096572076.html

China Approves $2.3 Billion Loan for Crisis-Hit Pakistan Ahead of Potential IMF Deal
https://sputniknews.com/20220622/china-approves-23-billion-loan-for-crisis-hit-pakistan-ahead-of-potential-imf-deal-1096566535.html

Sri Lanka Pins Hope on India, Russia as Fuel Supplies Run Out, Triggering Violence and Shutdowns
​(Prime Minister)​ Wickremesinghe has lauded the role of New Delhi in the ongoing crisis, underlining that it is the only nation to have assisted Colombo. India has provided Sri Lanka with around $3 billion in economic assistance since the crisis broke out this year.
​ ​Wickremesinghe also began talks on Monday with a delegation from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is visiting Colombo for the first time since the south Asian nation requested a bailout package of nearly $3 billion.​ (How can Sri Lanka pay back the IMF? Impose “austerity”?)​
​https://sputniknews.com/20220621/sri-lanka-pins-hope-on-india-russia-as-fuel-supplies-run-out-triggering-violence-and-shutdowns-1096511237.html

[John Day]

​ No contracted pump turbine repair leads to severe reduction in Nordstream pipeline gas flows.
German company Siemens shipped the turbines to Canadian maintenance site, which won’t return them to Germany, for return to pumping duty.
Canada is sorry that Germany is hurt, but hands-are-tied. Germany is sorry that France, Austria and the Czech Republic are getting hurt, but hands-are-tied.
Canada working to return Russian gas turbines
Ottawa intends to stick to anti-Russia sanctions, but does not want them to harm Germany
​ ​Canada is exploring ways to return crucial parts for Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline, which are currently stuck in the country due to sanctions, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday citing Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson.​..
..​The parts fall under Canada’s penalties against Russia, and Ottawa says it cannot return them without breaching these restrictions.
​ ​“We want to respect the sanctions because the sanctions were put into place for a reason. That being said, the intent of the sanctions was never to cause significant pain to Germany, which is one of our closest friends and allies. So, we are very seized with this issue,” Wilkinson told the news outlet.
​ ​“We are talking to Germany, trying to find a pathway through which we can actually enable the flow of gas. There may be different options that we can look at,” he stated, adding that Ottawa is negotiating with Berlin on ways to return the equipment.
​ ​According to the German Federal Grid Agency, the reduction in gas flow affected the supply of Russian gas from Germany to other European countries, including France, Austria and the Czech Republic.
https://www.rt.com/business/557618-canada-nord-stream-turbines/

The President of Mexico has now again offered full asylum to Julian Assange.
“Mexico opens the doors to Assange,” the president declared.
It is good to remember that AMLO spoke to Trump and offered asylum and he is now promising to speak to Biden, to again offer asylum.
AMLO’s briefing to journalists included playing the ‘collateral murder’ clip.

AMLO yet again blows the whistle on Julian Assange, educating his journalists

[John Day]

Competing Paradigms, with yet another pic of me doggedly reinforcing the tail-end of 13 kitchen cabinets before installation. https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/competing-paradigms

Another perspective on WEF’s “Great Reset”: “It’s not a Turndown”. It’s a Takedown”, Catherine Austin Fitts​
​ ​High food and fuel prices along with crushing interest rates are no accident. CAF explains, “To me, this is part of the ‘going direct reset.’ …”
​ ​“There is an official narrative, and the official narrative is they’ve got to stop inflation… Let’s look very simply at what happened. They voted on the direct reset. Then they injected $5 trillion into the economy that went to the insiders. Then they used Covid to shut down the economy run by the outsiders. Now, the outsiders want to open another business, and they are going to radically raise the cost of capital to the outsiders. What’s going to happen is that $5 trillion is going to buy more assets more cheaply. To me, this is part of centralizing the control of the economy. They are asserting very significant central control. This is not a turndown–this is a takedown.”
​ ​CAF’s view of the economy is simple and tangible. CAF says, “This is a world where people are trying to get into real assets that can generate a yield…”
​ ​”Let me tell you what the problem is. Doing things that create value on assets requires the rule of law. We are watching a very significant financial coup d’état. We have talked about this for years. That financial coup d’état is turning into a coup, and you are seeing a fundamental breakdown of law and order in many places. It is related to people trying to pick up assets. We see cities where crime is off the charts, and speculators are out having a field day picking up assets with that $5 trillion.”
​ ​CAF says, “At some point, you have to realize we are in a war…”
“We have an enemy. We have the power to win, but we are going to have to fight. If you look at our ancestors in the last 10,000 years, I dare say we have it in us. Let’s get out of fear and get into fighting mode. There are two roads. We can preserve, rebuild and protect the human civilization, or we can become slaves. If you look at what these guys are up to, death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Do not fear death. Fear slavery in a transhuman society.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/its-not-turndownits-takedown-austin-fitts

Michael Every of Rabobank thinks BRICS initiatives are likely to be ineffectual (but he’s not completely certain) [I think 3, then 2, then 1 happen in that order)
​ ​A BRICS alternative is that global shadow banking, actual banking, and real trade flows should all start to accept credit based on a new digital FX with commodities as collateral instead. Which also implies people won’t be able to repay their Eurodollar commitments.
​ ​There are lots of ways the West can respond to this.
1)​ ​Hedge fund billionaires and Wall Street can say ‘We want in!’, which is possible given Western financial systems operate like mercenaries rather than an army (which is why there are no countries around today that operate their national defence on that basis.) If that happens, some rich Westerners get richer, but the West loses its global pre-eminence and the geopolitical power to act on issues like Ukraine and Taiwan.
2)​ ​Or the Fed can say anyone using a BRICS currency loses access to the US financial system. That would bifurcate the world. As we already see with sanctions against Russia, it would also mean the West, and third parties, doesn’t get the commodities (or industrial goods) that the BRICS produce. That means massive inflation in some places, deflation in others, and global depression, not recession. I wouldn’t rule it out, but the end-game is clear.
3)​ ​Or the Fed can keep raising rates to force commodity prices down, raising the collateral attractiveness of the US$ and reducing that of its new rival. That would mean recession – and it already does. It would imply a massive blow-up for those leveraged long commodities – as with crypto. It would also make getting hold of US$ even harder – but that’s what Fed swap-lines, for friends, would be for. This is obviously not what the markets think will happen, and I understand why. (“Because markets.”) However, it’s not cartoonish. It’s just taking monetary policy into the geopolitical dimension, where it always sits, and most so when potential monetary rivals appear.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/powell-greyskull

(Brief excerpt, please excuse)
Pepe Escobar: Exile on Main Street: The Sound of the Unipolar World Fading Away
.. An expanded BRICS with a parallel G8 configuration is bound to easily overtake the Western-centric one in importance as well as GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP).
​ ​BRICS in 2021 already added Bangladesh, Egypt, the UAE and Uruguay to its New Development Bank (NDB). In May, at Foreign Ministry-level debates, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Thailand were added to the 5 BRICS members. Leaders of some of these nations will be connected to the Beijing summit.
​ ​BRICS plays a completely different game from the G20. They aim for the grassroots, and it’s all about slowly “building trust” – a very Chinese concept. They are creating an independent Credit Rating Agency – away from the Anglo-American racket – and deepening a Currency Reserves Arrangement. The NDB – including its regional offices in India and South Africa – has been involved in hundreds of projects. Time will tell: one day the NDB will make the World Bank superfluous.

Exile on Main Street: The Sound of the Unipolar World Fading Away

[John Day]

@Rototillerman: Yes, “Serious Adverse Events” … The dam(n) just broke on hiding study data from the public.

[John Day]

Former President Donald Trump has praised the Texas GOP for adopting a platform on June 18 that rejected the results of the 2020 presidential election…

The former president’s comments came days after Texas Republicans passed a resolution stating that President Joe Biden was “not legitimately elected,” and that “substantial” election fraud in key metropolitan areas influenced the results of the 2020 presidential election in favor of Biden.

“We believe that the 2020 election violated Article 1 and 2 of the US Constitution, that various secretaries of state illegally circumvented their state legislatures in conducting their elections in multiple ways, including by allowing ballots to be received after November 3, 2020,” states the GOP’s resolution passed on June 18, the last day of a three-day biennial Texas Republican convention held in Houston, Texas.

“We believe that substantial election fraud in key metropolitan areas significantly affected the results in five key states in favor of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. We reject the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/such-courage-trump-praises-texas-gop-disavowing-result-2020-presidential-election

[John Day]

Continuing a theme from last night: Aluminum smelting being shut down by high global electricity prices:
Aluminum smelting/extraction used (2010) 3% of global electricity, typically the cheap and steady stufflike rural hydroelectric. http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2011/07/15/electricity-consumption-in-the-production-of-aluminium/#:~:text=To%20put%20that%20in%20perspective,went%20to%20extraction%20of%20aluminium.
Bitcoin uses 0.5% of global electricity, typically cheap, steady rural electricity, but is far more mobile and able to move into an area quickly and move out again. (90% of Bitcoins have been “mined”.)
https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-usage-more-than-google-2021-9#:~:text=Bitcoin%20mining%20consumes%20roughly%200.5,per%20year%2C%20the%20report%20said.
Make a 5 year plan… 10 year plan … etc.

[John Day]

@VP Gary: Bitcoin use of electricity is crowding out aluminum smelting.

Miracle of the marketplace.

What could go wrong?

[John Day]

@VP Gary: The American Nazis skimmed the cream of the German Nazis.
The (wealthy/powerful) American Nazis never went away or changed their views during WW-2.

[John Day]

Faina Savenkova is a 13 year old girl. This is the letter she wrote to Tucker Carlson.

Truth is the way out of chaos To Journalist Tucker Carlson
Hello, Tucker. I am 13 years old and I live in Lugansk. I think many people from the American authorities do not even know where it is, but they continue to supply weapons to Ukraine for the war with Russia. For a week now, Ukrainian artillery has been mercilessly shelling Donetsk, killing civilians in the Donbass. It’s one thing to fight with the army, and another to just shoot guns at schools, kindergartens and sleeping residents. Many will say that this is deception and propaganda, but it is not so. I was born and live in Lugansk. I spent the entire war – since 2014 – in my hometown. Living in a war for 8 years is very hard. It’s very scary when your childhood is spent in such conditions. 8 years of hope for peace, which never came. But it didn’t break me. I keep telling the truth about what’s going on here. And I know that you do the same thing when you talk about America. I do not consider you a friend of Russia, but the fact that you are telling the truth and do not want a war with Russia pleases me. After all, if there is a nuclear war, there will be no winners in it.
.
I’ve had to turn to world leaders a lot. I’ve been trying to stop the war for three years, but they, like musicians and politicians, are deaf and dumb. Perhaps someone wants to calmly meet old age, someone is afraid of change, and someone simply does not understand what war is. After all, it is not next to them.
Last year, Ukrainian nationalists entered my personal data on the “myrotvorets.center” (english: “Peacemaker”) website, posting them in open access. After that, I started receiving threats. You may ask, “What is a myrotvorets.center?” Indeed, many in the US do not know what it is. If we compare, imagine if the Ku Klux Klan in the USA created its own website and posted there the addresses, bank accounts and other personal data of all politicians, actors and musicians who disagree with them. And the authorities would help them at the same time. This is what is happening in Ukraine now. A lot of my friends from Ukraine faced the same problem: “myrotvorets.center ” published their personal data, including address and phone number. Can you imagine such a thing in the USA? No.
It’s hard for me to say what will happen to me tomorrow. After all, I live in a war where shells arrive every day. But I believe that the war will end, just like the confrontation between Russia and the United States. And personally, Tucker, I want to wish you good luck. Thank you for trying to tell the truth, because someone has to do it. If there is chaos around, there must be people who can show the way out to the others.
Faina Savenkova, playwright and writer, 13-year-old girl, Lugansk

Letter from Faina Savenkova

[John Day]

The military industrial complex hires the smart ones that will do exactly what it pays them to do,
but some of them get wise to the game…

The wise are otherwise-employed.

[John Day]

Did Pfizer Roofie the Placebo Babies?
Saline injections are not supposed to have such an aggressive side effects profile. So what exactly was in Pfizer’s placebo injection?
https://ashmedai.substack.com/p/did-pfizer-roofie-the-placebo-babies

[John Day]

​ “Fghting ISIS” , Stealing stuff for democracy.
US Occupation Troops Steal Wheat from Syria to Send to Iraq
In addition to stealing Syrian wheat supplies, the US military has also been stealing Syrian oil
​ ​US occupation forces in Syria led a convoy of 40 trucks, each filled up with stolen Syrian wheat, into Iraq from Syria, according to an 18 June report from Syrian state news agency SANA.
​ ​The report indicates that the US military, along with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), looted large quantities of wheat from the Al-Jazeera region and transported it towards the Al-Waleed border crossing, where it entered Iraq on 18 June.
​ ​The report noted that this was not the only convoy filled with stolen goods led by the US military. Another convoy with 36 vehicles, filled with stolen Syrian wheat, crossed Al-Waleed border from the Tal Hamis area…
​ ​Damascus considers US presence in northeastern Syria a means of stealing Syrian resources…
​..​The US military routinely smuggles Syrian oil into northern Iraq, in a move that is both in violation of international law and as routine practice that shows how deeply entrenched the US is in its occupation of both nations.
​ ​The theft of Syrian food and fuel supplies is taking place amid a global food and fuel crisis.
​ ​Countries like Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen are already dealing with severe economic and food crises.
​ ​Once a major wheat producer, Syria is now facing food shortages. The western-backed war on Syria as well as a recent drought has made Syria more dependent on Russian wheat. https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-occupation-troops-steal-wheat-from-syria-send-to-iraq/5784105

​ Moon of Alabama fails to employ Rational-Actor-Theory. Since I do not see the Federal Government as “moral”​, this looks like standard trade protectionist practice. I am told that 3-layer solar panels are about to revolutionize that industry with much higher efficiencies at similar production costs. it’s proven technology, but was only used in space, due to licensing restrictions. Patents just expired. This will mess with global supply chains in a major way in the near term, which will conserve natural resources by impairing global economy with roadblocks.
This New Import Law Will Hurt U.S. Consumers
Today the the U.S., suffering from high inflation caused by a lack of supplies, is launching the dumbest sanction regime ever:
A new law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, goes into effect in the United States on Tuesday and will bar products that were made in Xinjiang or have ties to the work programs there from entering the country. It requires importers with any ties to Xinjiang to produce documentation showing that their products, and every raw material they are made with, are free of forced labor — a tricky undertaking given the complexity and opacity of Chinese supply chains.
In theory, the new U.S. law should block all goods made with any raw materials that are associated with Xinjiang until they are proven to be free of slavery or coercive labor practices…
For small importers it will be impossible to do the above. Only big companies can afford to research and provide all that data and to take the risk of importing products that may get confiscated at the border. They will of course ask their customers to pay for all that.
For the U.S. consumer this does not only mean higher prices but likely less access to products they need or want. The U.S. industry is not in state where it can provide on the scale that China can.
To avoid the scrutiny Chinese producers may eventually move their factories. But they will move to countries in South Asia and not to the United States.
Why the ‘green agenda’ Biden administration thought that this is a smart move is beyond me. (It does reduce resource consumption through economic strangulation. “Green” is a control narrative, which was somewhat compatible with physical reality , but less and less lately.)
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/06/this-new-import-law-will-hurt-us-consumers.html#more

No statistical evidence of benefit:​ “Hey, we tested these vaccines on several kids and they all did ok. This stuff is fine!”
(Drug companies are exempt from lawsuits on approved childhood vaccines.)
FDA “Approves” COVID Vaccine for 6-month-old Babies Despite Study Finding Persistent Heart Abnormalities Among COVID Vaccinated Children
https://www.globalresearch.ca/fda-approves-covid-vaccine-6-month-old-babies-despite-study-finding-persistent-heart-abnormalities-among-covid-vaccinated-children/5784082

[John Day]

​ ​This explanation is only semi-rational, even if you don’t know that cheap energ​y ​resources and global economy are in terminal burnout. In my assessment TPTB just need a big enough war to always be a big enough emergency for whatever emergency measures they need to declare until they figure out “the new thing”.​

New British Army Chief Sir Patrick’s Contentious Statement: “Prepare The Army to Fight in Europe Once Again”
​ ..On the one hand, a perpetual proxy war could atrophy Russian resources and uphold the US’ recently restored unipolar hegemony over Europe on an anti-Russian basis, but it could also backfire by collapsing its proxies’ economies, widening already emerging divisions between them over the conflict (e.g. the “Big Three” vs. UK-CEE), and boggling the US-led West down in Europe instead of focusing more on “containing” China in Asia. A possible “compromise” between these grand strategic visions is for the US to support the gradual de-escalation of the Ukrainian Conflict in light of the increasingly obvious impossibility of Kiev’s victory but ensure that the UK keeps stoking EU-Russian tensions indefinitely.
​ ​In practice, this could take the form of supporting the convergence between the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative” (3SI, with its core being the “Lublin Triangle” that comprises the newly de factoPolish–Ukrainian Confederation and Lithuania) and the UK’s regional alliance plans as a structural wedge between Russia and the “Big Three” (France, Germany, and Italy). That could in turn maintain some unbridgeable differences between them (i.e. geopolitical, geo-economic, and military) so as to perpetually prevent any meaningful rapprochement in the future that would risk eroding the US’ recently restored hegemony over the bloc.
​ ​With this in mind, the British army chief’s policy statement that his island-state should prepare for fighting a war in Europe makes more sense since it’s aimed at preconditioning the armed forces and the population that funds them into expecting a sustained military deployment to CEE.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/new-british-army-chief-sir-patricks-contentious-statement-prepare-the-army-to-fight-in-europe-once-again/5784060

​ This is actually not a bad assessment and looks at a lot of current crises-in-motion. (There is plenty of dirty coal, not the clean coal that industry used up in WW-1)
​Rabobank: We Are Heading For More Crashes, Bangs, Wallops
​ ​Indeed, as noted yesterday, Europe –like China– is plunging back into coal production again as Russian gas-flows tail off rapidly. The EU is chastising individual European countries for this backsliding, which makes sense in terms of a green strategy using future technology and future inputs, but little in terms of being able to keep the lights on this winter with current ones.
​ ​The US is also flailing for a response to high gasoline and diesel prices, and we have now seen two floated solutions: 1) subsidy cards for consumers – stymied by the US not having the chips to even make them, which speaks volumes about supply-side problems; and 2) that the US –like China– should start a state oil refinery to reverse the 5% drop in capacity since Covid, but would still take years to happen, even if were politically ‘acceptable’, which it isn’t.
​ ​The food situation, linked to energy, looks even worse.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rabobank-we-are-heading-more-crashes-bangs-wallops

​Paul sends this book review, the premise of which is that global shipping, especially the very large, very low massive container and tanker ships, have relied on the US Navy to keep the seas free from pirates, and the US no longer even has a merchant marine service.​ One successful business is modeling its shipping investments on the progressive failure of the US Navy to protect global shipping, and it is doing quite well. To me, the US could protect anybody’s ships as long as the finance was going through western banks in dollars, the oil trade in $US cemented this, but all this will change. We will see much more uncertainty than even now, in the ability to supply goods across oceans. Supply lines will break and industrial production will halt. Charles mentioned that above, and this is one mechanism.
The End Of The World Is Just Beginning For Shipping

The End Of The World Is Just Beginning For Shipping

[John Day]

“Act Rationally” is up, with picture of Namwah banana project on longest day of 2022. Limiting blog excerpts to minimize redundancy… https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/act-rationally

I have not had to face a complete threat to my worldview. That has made a lot of what is going on much easier for me to accept. I grew up with intelligent and broadly traveled grandparents on both sides who did not trust the wealthy, powerful or governments for very clear and established reasons.

I learned to drive and drove thousands of miles the summer of 1973, then we moved to Japan, and the Yom Kippur War and Arab Oil Embargo happened.
I was taught about the Limits to Growth as that embargo was going on across the Pacific in the USA. Resources get used up. Pollution happens. Economy shrinks. Population can’t be supported anymore so a lot of people die, but it would all happen in about 50 years; nothing bad until economic collapse time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
“I may not even be alive in 50 years, but I sure won’t get a retirement”, I thought.
Here we are.

Charles Hugh Smith, Our Economy In a Nutshell
The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling.
​ ​Beneath its surface stability, our economy is precarious because the foundation of the global economy– cheap energy–has reached an inflection point: from now on, energy will become more expensive.
​ ​The cost will be too low for energy producers to make enough money to invest in future energy production, and too high for consumers to have enough money left after paying for the essentials of energy, food, shelter, etc., to spend freely.
​ ​For the hundred years that resources were cheap and abundant, we could waste everything and call it growth: when an appliance went to the landfill because it was designed to fail (planned obsolescence) so a new one would have to be purchased, that waste was called growth because the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) went up when the replacement was purchased.
​ ​A million vehicles idling in a traffic jam was also called growth because more gasoline was consumed, even though the gasoline was wasted.
​ ​This is why the global economy is a “waste is growth” Landfill Economy​.​..

​ ​Now that we’ve consumed all the easy-to-get resources, all that’s left is hard to get and expensive. For example, minerals buried in mountains hundreds of miles from paved roads and harbors require enormous investments in infrastructure just to reach the deposits, extract, process and ship them to distant mills and refineries. Oil deposits that are deep beneath the ocean floor are not cheap to get.
​ ​Does it really make sense to expect that the human population can triple and our consumption of energy increase ten-fold and there will always be enough resources to keep supplies abundant and prices low? No, it doesn’t.
​ ​Many people believe that nuclear power (fusion, thorium reactors, mini-reactors, etc.) will provide cheap, safe electricity that will replace hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas). But nuclear power is inherently costly, and there are presently no full-scale fusion or thorium reactors providing cheap electricity to thousands of households.
​ ​Reactors take many years to construct and are costly to build and maintain. Cost over-runs are common. A new reactor in Finland, for example, is nine years behind schedule and costs have tripled.
​ ​The U.S. has built only two new reactors in the past 25 years.​..
​ ​Many believe so-called renewable energy such as solar and wind will replace hydrocarbons. But as analysts Nate Hagens has explained, these sources are not truly renewable, they are replaceable; all solar panels and wind turbines must be replaced at great expense every 20 to 25 years. These sources are less than 5% of all energy we consume, and it will take many decades of expansion to replace even half of the hydrocarbon fuels we currently consume.
​ ​To double the energy generated by wind/solar in 25 years, we’ll need to build three for each one in service today: one to replace the existing one and two more to double the energy being produced.
​ ​All these replacements for hydrocarbons require vast amounts of resources: diesel fuel for transport, materials for fabricating turbines, panels, concrete foundations, and so on.
​ ​Humans are wired to want to believe that whatever we have now will still be ours in the future. We don’t like being told we’ll have less of anything in the future.
​ ​The current solution is to create more money out of thin air in the belief that if we create more money, then more oil, copper, iron, etc. will be found and extracted.​..​​..Many people feel good about recycling a small part of what we consume. But recycling is not cost-free, and the majority of what we consume is not recycled.
​ ​The percentage of lithium batteries that are recycled, for example, is very low, less than 5%. We have to mine vast quantities of lithium because we dump 95% of lithium-ion batteries in the landfill. There are many reasons for this, one being that the batteries aren’t designed to be recycled because this would cost more money.
​ ​The majority of all manufactured goods–goods that required immense amounts of hydrocarbons to make–are tossed in the landfill.
​ ​Goods and services are commoditized and sourced from all over the world in long dependency chains (hyper-globalization): if one link breaks, the entire supply chain breaks.​..

..​Each of these systems is dependent on all the other systems (what we call a tightly bound system), so when one critical system unravels, the crisis quickly spreads to the entire economic system: one domino falling knocks down all the dominoes snaking through the global economy.​ (Internet?)
​ Those who understand how tightly interconnected, unsustainable systems are basically designed to unravel can prepare themselves by becoming antifragile: flexible, adaptable and open to the opportunities that arise when things are disorderly and unpredictable.​ (Easily said.)
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun22/economy-nutshell6-22.html

M.K. Bhadrakumar, “West at inflection point in Ukraine war”​ ​“Fundamentally, the Western economies are facing a systemic crisis. The complacency that the reserve-currency-based US economy is impervious to ballooning debt; that the petrodollar system compels the entire world to purchase dollars to finance their needs; that the flood of cheap Chinese consumer goods and cheap energy from Russia and Gulf States would keep inflation at bay; that interest rate hikes will cure structural inflation; and, above all, that the consequences of taking a trade-war hammer to a complex network system in the world economy can be managed — these notions stand exposed.”​ ​https://www.indianpunchline.com/west-at-inflection-point-in-ukraine-war/

​ Michael Hudson article is short enough that I won’t edit it, but it hinges upon a point that Charles made above, that the prices are too low for producers and too high for consumers. In classic and Marxist analysis the cost of energy is not considered as such, because coal was just one input, for instance. Hudson does not often give enough thought to why energy costs are too high for consumers and too low for energy producers​. He does look at parasitic costs of predatory financial capitalism, how nobody makes money investing long term anymore (refineries in the news. Also predatory costs of bureaucracy, especially as to making mandates that happen to create a single monopoly in many fields, with monopoly pricing, and the costs of ever growing regulatory and distributive bureaucracies.
The crude “fix” to rebalance the system is to squeeze the wages of productive workers. This has been done already since 1977. At the same time the costs of daily life, fees, taxes, professional bills, utilities, licensing, groceries, medical and other insurance have all gone up, up, up. That card is being played again, by raising interest rates, but the squeezed have no blood to give. More are losing their places to live. Another recent interview had Professor Hudson advocating “making America Great again” by copying China copying the America of 120 years ago. That would mean putting all public utilities back in public ownership, including banking (Bank of North Dakota style) and lowering predatory rent costs to the economic system that way.
The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages
​ ​Addendum: Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism reminds me that: “Paul Volcker made it explicit that the Fed is in the business of crushing labor. As reported by William Greider in Secrets of the Temple, when Volcker was driving interest rates to the moon, he kept a note card in his pocket. It was a record of weekly average construction wages. Volcker wanted them to go down as proof his harsh medicine was working.” https://thesaker.is/the-feds-austerity-program-to-reduce-wages/

[John Day]

@My Parents Said Know: I also agreed with DBS and left that comment on the late-night thread, but failed to address your question about the novel-insect discovery, which I now better understand.

I am an outlier. You may not want to do as I do. What I do is an experiment, and I’ll share myobservations-to-date.

When Jenny and I trekked the Annapurna trail (3 weeks) in 1988, our friend, who trekked the first half with us, was Jain, and practiced “Ahimsa”, non-violence, to the degree that David would not kill mosquitos on his body. I noticed this behavior and asked him about it. He gave a good and detailed explanation, and I have read further on Jain philosophy since then.
I accept it partly, but find that it’s acceptance of “finance”as a non-violent career does not accord to my current perceptions of the actual workings of economy. “No easy answers”, I think.

I employ Ahimsa in my gardens, not using pesticides, and throwing caterpillars away from the garden when I discover them. I would toss a beetle, perhaps, and I always toss grasshoppers (voracious buggers).

What I have found is that pest infestations last one year, not more, and that the following year, predators that eat the pest are in place. there is a balance after that. I do have to have enough garden to out-produce the critters to some degree, but I am a broad-basedeater, and most critters are far narrower in what they will eat.

Special cases are squirrels, which are controlled by hawks in Yoakum, but not nearly as controlled in Austin. Squirrels rule my trees in Austin, and bite some tomatoes. I cannot have a garden without excluding deer, which are semi-tame in our neighborhood, and can’t get into the back garden over the tall wooden fence. We don’t have bunnies. Oxymoron can probably talk about dealing with rabbits.
I think they are harder to exclude, but well-made fencing is used.

Aphids are species specific, and I keep rotating what is in the beds. Ants do “farm” aphids. They are an essential coupler. When it gets warmer and aphids get my cabbages, kale and collards, I remove those and put in tomatoes. It’s a signal. Aphids will eventually get to the okra, but later, and okra is tough and productive, so no big problem, self-limited minor-problem.

I sometimes don’t splat mosquitoes, but If I’m hot, sweaty, irritable and pushing a mower in sun, heat and humidity, my reflexes do whatever my reflexes do.
“Natural consequences”.

[John Day]

My ParentsSaid Know said:
“What do you do when powerful people are trying to kill you and they really aren’t all that subtle about it, but no one else seems to care that they are also targets, but you do.
If you were to seek counseling, you would be diagnosed as paranoid. You’re not. There are people who are trying to kill you- not you specifically, but you- an excess human.
What do you do?
They are inexorable. It is discouraging. It is this raw. There are those who are trying to kill us. What should be done?
Not 1984- we’re all livin’ in the twilight zone.
They’re doing it to babies, now, people.”

I really like D Benton Smith’s answer just above.
This is not different from forever, just different than we were tught in herd-school.

Cognitive Dissonance is created if you try to take in information which leads to a realistic evolutionary world view, after actually believing what you were taught as a child in herd-school. Furtunately, i had already been exposed to more realistic worldviews, and grew up on USMC bases during Vietnam, so I never thought that peoeple would not be fed into meat grinders as policy. I sought to understand WHY this kept happening.
“Temporary insanity” never seemed like a plausible answer in either side of my family.

[John Day]

@VP Gary: Common-ground enough, then?

🙂

[John Day]

Thanks Red: I’m paying attention.

@Dr. D: Monitoring your feed and agreeing again today.

[John Day]

VP Gary said: “John, you’re totally wrong about FDR ~ You’re liberal indoctrination has blinded you to the Truth…”

Wait, wait, wait a minute, Amigo. Maybe I’m only PARTLY wrong again.

FDR was complex, and there were 3 assassination attempts upon him by the Bushs, Harrimans, tc before his inauguration.
Smedley Butler foiled the “Business Plot”. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Navigation/Community/Arcadia-and-THP-Blog/September-2018/Smedley-Butler-and-the-1930s-Plot-to-Overthrow-the
That’s acceptable, right?

FDR was clearly of their same class, a “Patrician”. They considered him a class traitor. Trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt was also somewhat of a class-traitor, but he was such a great imperial-expansionist, too.

This was an internicene rivalry between elite factions, the fascists, who seemed to win after FDRs death, and took over the reins of western empire under (puppet) Truman: Eisenhower was complicit, gave a vague warning on his way out, and washed his hands. Kennedy died, then another Kennedy died.
Eric Zuesse does a better than usual job here (sooo much more to be said about Harry-Truman-the-enabler) This is a fair timeline of the Bush faction takeover and change of trajectory promptly upon FDRs timely death. https://southfront.org/how-did-america-become-ruled-by-its-military-industrial-complex/

FDR was his own complex man. I did not grow up in a liberal or overly credulous family, quite the contrary, but FDRs death was a subject of much consternation in my early years, a frequent topic of conversation. these were Goldwater-Republicans at that time, leading to the 1962 elections.

FDR did scheme to lead Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor, and monitored japanese communications, knew the date, pulled the carriers out 2 weeks prior and the modern ships out 7 days prior, kept the army and navy in the dark, and made sure lots of Americans died. He clearly did that.

FDR may have had his own deeper and hidden imperial schemes, but he kept secrets well. He kept the atom bomb a secret from Truman, but Truman was a dim bulb, and a tool. Everything FDR said and his actions accorded to his words, led into a dismantling of the British Empire, which he did accomplish, and to setting up a multipolar world at Yalta, and with UN, IMF and plans for global dollar trade and control of oil markets and shipping lanes. We will not know how this would actually have gone.
Dewey did NOTdefeat Truman, whatever the mechanism of that might have been. https://www.amazon.com/Dewey-Defeats-Truman-Election-Americas/dp/1328585069

Dewey was FDRs chosen successor. Truman was foist upon him as VP by the same interests that tried to kill him, and they may have succeeded.

What FDR did during the great depression was to get the world’s gold into the US. That was a strategic move. He robbed Americans to do it, but didn’t kill any by that move. He successfully draind the UK of gold. he made them pay in gold when they needed to battle Germany.
The New Deal did a lot of weird things under Harry Hopkins, and it is true that Americans did not do better economically with the devaluation of the dollar, but industry kicked ass exporting with the dollar that cheap,and all the gold came to America, because the products were so cheap and the dollars were worth relatively more in goods than in gold. Yes, American labor paid for that investment in future American postwarfinancial greatness.

Again, I think I’m only partly wrong, and I admit it, and you and I both don’t really know where FDRs track would have led, but not to Korea or Vietnam… My (Republican USMC) dad would not have gone to those wars.

[John Day]

@D BentonSmith: “The acid test of the moral legitimacy of any government, from largest to smallest, is whether or not that ‘government’ will actually let you do the right thing when you need to.
I haven’t found one yet…”

Bhutan?
Yanomamo in Amazon rain forest?
Don’t just give up, Man!

[John Day]

@Red:
Careful, Bro’, we didn’t even take those classes in college.
We ougt to leave eugenicidal-herd-thinning to experts with training and experience.
It’s above our pay grade.

Moooo…

[John Day]

testing…

[John Day]

Thought the Western-Empire is “in power”, which is declining hard, it is not “America”, per se, just as ordinary Britons, including those enlisted in the British military were not served by that empire, but were expendible pawns, who occasionally got an “attaboy!”

There is a lot to support the case that the Western-Empire just diversified a bit, using the American military and $US, instead of the British military and pund sterling. FDR wanted to de-imperialize the world, but his plans were re-routed after his death to a new financial-imperialism.

The City of London and NYC operate in tandem within this system, and have the Cayman Islands and other small venues for special features.

FDR really was planning for a multipolar world. His death has always been suspicious. Stalin was absolutely convinced that “Churchill’s gang” poisoned him. The means and motive werecertainly there, and there had been 3 assassination attempts on FDR before he took office, then that attempt to get an army of US veterans to overthrow him, outed bySmedly Butler.

The Han Chinese attitude, after thousands of years of ruling-the-world (until it got bigger) is naturally that the Han rule the world, with occasional lapses.
The rest of Asia knows this and always wants some counterbalance to unrestricted Han Chinese power.
“China” as now constituted is an empire of subjugated peoples for the most part.
Vietnam, Thailand, the Koreas, Japan and Taiwan are acutely aware that they are always on the list to be invaded again Cambodia, Laos and Burma are functioning as Chinese colonies.
The Han hand has always been heavy, harsh and arbitrary.
You don’t want to live under that hand either.

[John Day]

Thanks Slimyalligator and D Benton Smith.

@others: Politeness helps, please.

[John Day]

D Benton Smith said:
“In other words, to survive as a species we must and therefor we shall either gain wisdom or lose power. And it’s being played out right now.
I’m willing to negotiate my surrender. Sure hope that the boss still is.”

That’s my assessment, too, and it may be jittery, in fits and starts, so I’m trying to go on ahead, do my best, and not be roadkill.

[John Day]

Moscow will throw its full support toward helping the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics revive their war-torn economies, Russia’s trade and industry minister, Denis Manturov, told RT on Friday.
“We have met with the heads of both republics for detailed talks over plans for economic reconstruction,” …​
​The Construction Ministry said it would also help rebuild and manage critical infrastructure and prepare for the winter.
Schools, hospitals and daycare centers, as well as housing, will be the priorities.
​ ​The Donbass republics have already signed cooperation agreements with several Russian regions. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has recently announced that 300 specialists from the city are already working to restore the water supply in Donetsk.
​ ​Meanwhile, DPR leader Denis Pushilin said on Friday that a deal had been signed to buy food and building materials from Iran. He added that Donetsk plans to sell metal, cast iron, mining equipment, fertilizer, and other goods to the Islamic Republic.
https://www.rt.com/business/557387-russia-rebuild-donbass-trade-minister/

KURDISH, PRO-GOVERNMENT & IRANIAN-BACKED FORCES SET UP JOINT OPERATION ROOM IN SYRIA’S ALEPPO​ (This is an allied joint command.)
​ Kurdish, pro-government and Iranian-backed formations had established a joint operations room called the “North Thunderbolt” in Syria’s Aleppo to coordinate against Turkey, the Al-Monitor reported on June 19.
​ ​The operatio​​ns room, which was established on May 25, is headquartered at a Russian base in the village of Hardatnin in the northern countryside of Aleppo.​..
..Two Russian officers, three officers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, three Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leaders and two leaders from the pro-government forces are reportedly present at the operations room, which commands some 600 fighters.

Kurdish, Pro-Government & Iranian-Backed Forces Set Up Joint Operation Room In Syria’s Aleppo

​ Medical Vitamin-D expert, David Grimes MD has been sorting through Canadian government health statistics, which are cumulative.
He substacted the totals from the week of 4/10/22 from the week of 4/17/22 and found this information about COVID deaths for that week.​
​ ​Covid-19 deaths among the unvaccinated increased from 9511 to 9512, an increase during the week of just one.
Only 1 of the 227 Covid-19 deaths was a person who had not been vaccinated. Let this true but unpublicised fact sink in.
http://www.drdavidgrimes.com/

[John Day]

Making efforts to avoid re-posting items already posted on TAE.
Pictue of “cold-tolerant” avocado seedlings faring differently. the biggest 2 handled winter the best.
https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/non-wef-alliances

Michael Hudson’s recent interview is largely on the history of western economics as a study, updated to current trends.
Economic Rent and Exploitation:
..Patten cited public roads and canals to lower the cost of doing business. He also noted that every time you build a road or railroad, you’re going to raise the land value along these routes – and lower land prices for areas replaced by the now-more-accessible producers. You can simply self-finance the cost of these by taxing the rent.
You also need public education, and that should be free so that you don’t have like today, to earn enough money to pay an enormous student debt – and receive a high salary to afford to pay that…

..So the movement towards public infrastructure towards government spending was led by the industrialists. It was they themselves who wanted strong government. The common denominator of politics from Adam Smith through all of the 19th century was to free economies from the unnecessary economic rent, to free them from unearned income, from the free lunch. To do that, you have to have a government strong enough to take on the vested interests – first the landlord class in the House of Lords, and then the financial class behind it…

..Government infrastructure is a fourth means of production. But what makes it different from profits and wages is that if you’re a wage earner, you want to make as high a wage as possible. If you’re a capitalist, you want to make as high a profit as possible. But the job of public investment is not to make an income, not to do what was done under Thatcher and Tony Blair, not to treat public utilities, education and health as profit making opportunities. Instead, Patten said, you should measure their productivity by how much they lower the cost of doing business and the cost of living for the economy at large…

..Protectionists in America said the way to minimise costs – and it may seem an oxymoron to you – the way you minimise costs is to have high-wage labour. You raise the wages of labour, or more specifically, you want to raise the living standards, because highly paid labour, highly educated labour, well fed labour, well rested labour is more productive than pauper labour. So they said explicitly, America’s going to be a high wage economy. We’re not like Europe. Our higher wages are going to provide high enough living standards to provide high labour productivity. And our higher labour productivity, shorter working day, better working conditions, healthy working conditions, public health, well educated labor will undersell that of countries that don’t have an active public sector…

..Needless to say, the fight for the kind of democracy that will free economies from economic rent was not easy. By the late 1880s, and especially the 1890s, you had the rentiers fighting back. In America the fight was led by John Bates Clark. There was a movement, which today is called neoliberalism, to deny the entire thrust of classical economics. Clarke said that there is no such thing is unearned income. That meant that economic rent does not exist. Whatever a businessman makes, he is said to earn. Whatever a landlord makes, he earns – so there was no unearned income…

On difficulties with big government and small government:
..In the 19th century, in order to tax the land rent, you had to take on the most powerful vested interests of all: the real estate interests and the financial interests. But Henry George was a libertarian. He was for small government. He broke with the socialists, because he warned that socialism had a potential for authoritarianism. Well, we know that he was right in that warning, because we saw what happened in Stalinist Russia. But obviously, what you want is a government that is strong and democratic, and with enough authority to tax and regulate the vested interests. (That term is Veblen’s, by the way.) That was the ideal in America, but it needed a strong enough government so that Teddy Roosevelt could come in and be able to bust the trusts.​..​

​..​The government was strong enough in 1913-14 to impose an American income tax that fell just on 1% of the population, almost entirely on economic rent, on land rent, mineral rent on monopoly rent of the big corporations. If you’re a libertarian, your government is too small to take on these vested interests. And you’ll never win…

..I find little interest in today’s socialist movement or the socialist movement 50 years ago about land rent. They are more concerned about international issues, about war, about almost everything except land rent. And today I find the greatest interest in rent theory as a guide to a tax system in the context of an overall economic system to be in China. So that’s really where the debate over how to keep the price of housing down by keeping the financial sector from trying to capitalise the land rent into a bank loan…

..Russia could have been a low-cost economy. It could have kept the oil and gas, Yukos, GazProm, nickel and platinum resources all in the public domain to finance investment in re-industrialization, to become independent of the West. But as we all know, Ted and the people that Fred Harrison bought were completely overwhelmed by the billions of dollars that U.S. diplomats spent on promoting kleptocracy and shock therapy in Russia. Its officials andinsiders worked for themselves, not Russia…

..The National Income and Product Accounts treat rent as a product, not a subtrahend
A byproduct of this value-free doctrine is how countries calculate their national income and product accounts. And if you look at the GDP accounts for the United States (and I’ve published a number of articles on my website and in major economic journals), rent is counted as part of GDP.​..
​..A classical economic accounting format would show how much of the prices for what our society produces is actually necessary, and how much is a subtrahend. Classical economists treat the land rent that you pay, interest charges and monopoly prices as a rake-off. So not all of your income is income equals “product,” because only a portion of that income represents a real product.
​ ​In America, the head of Goldman Sachs a few years ago said Goldman Sachs partners – a financial management firm – make more money than almost anyone else in America, because they’re the most productive. If you make a lot of money, by definition, you make it by being productive. That’s the false identity…

..A precondition for what you call an economist, especially a Nobel Prize winning economist, is not to understand how the economy works. Because if you understand that, you’re going to threaten the vested interests that are getting the free lunch. You have to say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, everybody earns whatever they can get. Robbers and criminals like that idea. “Yeah, we stole it fair and square!”..

…So the way that the economy works today is no longer industrial capitalism; it is finance capitalism. Instead of Industrial Engineering, making society produce more with all of the environmental protection cost included, you have financial engineering, making wealth by increasing stock-market prices. Wealth is not achieved by earning it. You don’t save up your earnings and get wealthy. I think half of Americans are unable to raise $400 In an emergency. They have no savings at all..

.​..​Under Reagan’s 1981 tax “reform” you could pretend that if you buy a big commercial building, you can write off 1/7 of the entire costs every single year as tax deductible income. At the end of seven years, you change your ownership from one name to another name, and you start all over again. The same building can be re depreciated again and again and again… But nowhere in the national income statistics is a report of how much income real estate owners actually claim as depreciation. They haven’t done that because if they showed this, people would think, ‘Wait a minute, this is a giveaway. This is utterly unrealistic.”​…​

..The purpose of industrial capitalism was to free economies from the legacy of feudalism. And the legacy of feudalism was the landlord-warrior class collecting hereditary rent and the predatory banks that were not making loans for industry. None of the industrialists got their money to invest from banks. The inventors of the steam engine couldn’t get loans except by mortgaging their houses. Banks don’t lend money to create capital, only for the right to foreclose on it…

..Until 1971, countries running a balance of payments deficit would have to settle it either in gold or by selling off their industry to investors in the payments-surplus countries. Well, beginning with the war in Korea in 1950-1951, the U.S. balance of payments moved into deficit. The entire U.S. balance of payments deficit from the Korean War to the 1970s was a result of its foreign military spending.
​ By ​the time the Vietnam war was ending, the Americans had to sell its gold every month. Vietnam had been a French colony, so the banks there were French. As America spent more dollars in Southeast Asia, these dollars were sent from local French bank branches to their head offices in Paris. The Paris bank would turn over these dollars to the central bank for francs, and the central bank, under General de Gaulle, would cash in these dollars for gold.
​ ​Germany was doing the same thing, using its export proceeds that were paid in dollars to buy gold…

..My job at Chase was to analyse basically the balance of payments of Third World countries and then of the oil industry. I had to develop an accounting format to find how much does the oil industry actually makes in the rest of the world. I had to calculate natural-resource rent, and how large it was. I did that from 1964 till October 1967. Then I had to quit to finish my dissertation to get the PhD. And then I developed the system of balance-of-payments analysis that actually was the way it had been calculated before GDP analysis.
​ ​I went to work for Arthur Andersen and spent a year calculating the whole U.S. balance of payments. That’s where I found that it was all military in character, and I began to write in popular magazines like Ramparts, warning that America’s foreign wars were forcing it to run out of gold. That was the price that America was paying for its military spending abroad.
​ ​I realised as soon as it went off gold in 1971 that America now had a cost-free means of military spending. Suppose you were to go to the grocery store and just pay in IOUs. You could just keep spending If you could convince the owner, the grocer to use the IOU to pay the farmers and the dairy people for their products. What if everybody else used these IOUs as money? You would continue to get your groceries for free.
​ ​That’s how the United States economy works under the dollar standard, at least until the present…

..Just about everybody thought that it would take many years for China, Russia, Iran, India, Indonesia and other countries to get their act together and create an alternative. But this year the Biden administration itself destroyed America’s free ride for the dollar. First the United States grabbed Venezuela’s foreign exchange, then Biden grabbed all of the foreign exchange of Afghanistan, just confiscated it. And then a month ago he confiscated $300 billion of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves. He said, in effect, that we are the leading democracy in the world, and global democracy means that America’s military gets to appoint foreign presidents…

..Europe has committed economic suicide, United States offered its leaders a lot of money in their offshore accounts, and made sure that their kids got free education in the United States. But in return, they would have to represent the United States, not Germany, France or other countries. The Americans have been meddling in European politics for years. European politicians do not represent their own countries. They represent the American State Department and American diplomacy. And they were told to lock their countries into the U.S. economy…
..America said that you Europeans are bothering them by trying to stop global warming. That’s a direct attack on a major arm of U.S. diplomacy, the oil industry. American companies control almost all the world’s oil trade. It’s the highest rent-yielding sector in the world. And it’s income-tax free. It’s politically powerful, and as long as America can control the oil trade, it can talk to Latin American countries or African countries and say if they elect a leader that U.S. officials don’t like, it can impose sanctions and stop exporting oil to them to freeze them out. They won’t get fertilizer, so the U.S. can starve you out. It can put a sanction on their food trade.

Agriculture is Americans biggest trade surplus…

Regarding the developing alternate world trade block:
They’re going to hold each other’s currencies. Especially now that Russia is denominating its exports, in roubles instead of dollars. The American banks have lost the trade financing of the world oil trade, certainly Russian oil and agricultural trade. Instead of holding dollars, countries will hold rouble reserves to stabilise their currencies via the rouble, China is holding rouble reserves, and Russia is holding Chinese yuan reserves.
The balance will be held more in gold and some kind of assets without a liability attached to them. I think the logical direction in which this is moving is that the non-dollar countries will create their own version of the International Monetary Fund, their own World Bank, their own trade organization…

..If American Europe is left with its current foreign policy, biowarfare and atomic bombs, NATO will be shunned by the civilised world. As Rosa Luxemburg said a century ago, the choice is between socialism or barbarism. NATO, Europe and America represent the new barbarism. The alternative is socialism. That is how the world seemed to be developing in Europe and America until World War I untracked everything. The rest of the world now has a chance to get back on track. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the West. https://thesaker.is/economic-rent-and-exploitation-michael-hudson-shepheard-walwyn/

Russian warships have destroyed a Ukrainian command center with Kalibr cruise missiles, killing dozens officers, Moscow’s Defense Ministry reported on Sunday. “More than 50 generals and officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were killed,” the statement outline. The strike took place near the village of Shirokaya Dacha in Dnepropetrovsk Region. It hit a compound where commanders of several Ukrainian units had gathered for a meeting, according to Moscow. The ministry added that Kalibr missiles were also used to destroy 10 M777 howitzers and up to 20 armored vehicles that were recently delivered from the West, and had been stored inside a factory building in the southern city of Nikolayev. https://www.rt.com/russia/557428-50-ukrainian-generals-officers-killed-russia/

[John Day]

@Archie: We have frequented this blog similar amounts of time, since early 2008 for me. I found ZH from a post on TAE.
The contributors to comments and the culture of the section have changed continuously.
I’m trying to be of service. That’s a good part of this culture.
How reality works is in question. It’s not a decided question. It bears discussion and personal exploration in these critical times.

@V.Arnold: You live in Thailand, Man. As an expat in Thailand you should have a broader view of how the world might-possibly work. The Dwarf Namwah banana plants are having a very good year so far in Yoakum.
Anything that causes irritation might be a lesson on the path.

[John Day]

@VP Gary: Thanks.
Live and let live. Not all debates can be settled.

[John Day]

“Economics” and “truth”being topics, Michael Hudson has a new interview transcript out which addresses both of these, as relatedto “econmics” and also to the actual movements and applications of capital, which he learned are very different, so had to do his dissertation on “The History Of Economic Thought” and skip what he learned on his job evaluating global capital movements, balance-of-payments actuarial analysis.

Economic Rent and Exploitation: Michael Hudson, Shepheard Walwyn

Where are we now and where might we soon go?

[John Day]

Formerly T-Bear will not consider, nor discuss that which cannot be framed “objectively”.

Isaac Newton was a practiotioner of “Natural Philosophy”, and also an Alchemist. He had spiritual beliefs.

Albert Eistein said “God does not play at dice”. He felt that he knew.

“Feelings” are subjective experience. “Stones fall from the sky” on some people, but not upon others.

1967 and this summer are times of mass changes in consciousness, “the summer of love”, and the French student movement, which became a revolution in 1968. You may use Zeitgeist in a sense of “current fashion”, but it can also efer to Jung’s “collective unconscious”, which is how I usually use the term.

We disagree.
I agree that it’s fine, and wish you well.

[John Day]

Kassandra said (and I never disagreed, just pointed out another group of american expats):
“I’ve been to these ex-pat areas in Mexico and Costa Rica. Very few are contributing to the country and locals, other than providing menial “jobs” to maintain their lovely homes and gardens. I liken them to the rich people buying their compounds in Montana. They will be targets for the locals if things get bad enough.”

To the degree that Mexicans survive in some more-stable areas, American ex-pats, who are working and contributing and become community members, should also survive. This is a smaller group, usually with mixed marriages and family-ties.

[John Day]

Kassandra said:
“Do upper middle class gringos living in their compounds really think they will be safe there if/when the SHTF? I grew up in SoCal in primarily Mexican neighborhoods in the 80s. I know how I was treated. Sure, it can be a lovely culture and I have close friends who are from Mexico, but I also know the history. I really don’t understand how people think Mexico is going to be their safe haven. Or Egypt or Pakistan. Really? Enlighten me.”

I have different kinds of friends living-sojourning in Mexico in different ways.
You observe those who are sold a good-bargain-living-arrangement product. Mexico is regionalized into fiefdoms. Cartels are not powerful in many places, or know to leave themalone and take some tribute, so as to not kill the tourism goose that lays golden eggs.
On the other hand are people with family connections and other real connections, people who garden and homestead themselves within non-tourist communities. They are different. They are more realistic and self-reliant problem-solvers, not product-buyers. They often have several options in several places, upon which they regularly work and invest sweat equity, farming somwhere in summer and somewhere else in winter, so to speak (or actually).

[Author]

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