[This report was originally published on The Cradle] A race is now underway that will determine the shape of things to come for many generations. While it is easy to get lost in the swarm of chaotic facts, sound bites, narrative spin, and other noise, it is vital to keep sight of the larger historical forces shaping our present crisis-ridden age.
Yes! I did an episode on this Glazyev interview called The West vs The Rest. I concur with PJ that Hudson (on whom I've done several episodes) asked a very interesting question about dollarized debts, and Glazyev's answer (that there was no need to repay them) was revolutionary. It's a little breathtaking to see the trends I identified in my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, reach fruition at such breakneck speed. I'm so glad that you're reporting on them.
The conclusion in my book was taking the principles of Glazyev / Hudson and figuring out how to apply them on a micro-scale. I talk about this in today's YouTube, Build a New Model. I'll post the link to the Substack when it's finished. It's an exciting time, despite the turmoil, but those of us who live under imperial currencies need to protect our community assets because they'll be the only things left to grab!
contin...In all of this maze of CB models the most puzzling thing to try to come to terms with is that the true policy independence of Central Banks has little, if anything, to do with ownership. I want to scream every time I hear the false mantra that all central banks are owned by the Rothchilds... this is patently untrue.
There are only 3 CBs in which all of the shares are owned entirely by private owners. The vast majority of the remainder have 100% ownership of the shares by the Govt.
Those of note that are not 100% state-owned are listed here...
Country Government Ownership %
United States 0%
Italy 0%
South Africa 0%
Greece 35%
Belgium 50%
Switzerland 51%
Turkey 51%
Japan 55%
San Marino 67%
The only real certainty I can think of is that if a CB is totally privately owned then there would be less than a snowball's chance in hell of any semblance of independence. Business is business, and it is patently obvious that it will be the owners and their cronies that their policy serves primarily. Given that the most common mandates involve inflation and unemployment, and these are so easily manipulated, even the mandates can easily be rendered farcical.
Add to the mix the fact that these CBs are protected from audit and it becomes child's play for blatant theft to occur on a massive scale. So too with market-making, outrageous balance sheet expansions, and dodgy instruments that allow for all manner of indiscretions to be hidden off books and the sky is the limit.
Spend half an hour from time to time reading Pam and Ross Martens wallstreetonparade.com and the amount of chicanery that occurs in broad daylight just simply beggars belief. Remember too that the US taxpayer is on the hook for 98% of the FEDs balance sheet... also that in 2008 their balance sheet stood at less than $1 trillion... today it is around $9 trillion.
And look at this Deauzy and the star borrower in cumulative Repo loans [overnight and short term loans] at a mind-numbing $3.7 trillion... Nomura. And who is, you might well ask is Nomura?... why none other than the corporation that swallowed up the Asian division of Lehman's when they went tits up in 2008.
Just the blatant skulduggery during Trump's reign simply beggared belief. The long and the short of it was by inventing SPVs [Special Purpose Vehicles] and goodness knows what other financial chicanery.
...here is just a small taste quoted from the link...
"The stimulus bill known as the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) was signed into law by President Donald Trump on March 27. Among its many features (such as direct checks to struggling Americans and enhancing unemployment compensation by $600 per week for four months to unemployed workers so they could pay their rent and buy food) the bill also carved out a dubious $454 billion (or 25 percent of the total $1.8 trillion spending package) for the U.S. Treasury to hand over to the Federal Reserve. This was the Faustian Bargain the Democrats had to agree to in order to get the deal approved by the Wall Street cronies in the Senate.
If you subtract the $454 billion from the $1.8 trillion total spending package, that left $1.346 trillion for other purposes. But the $454 billion wasn’t really just $454 billion. It was going to be leveraged up by a factor of 10 to 1 into a $4.54 trillion bailout for Wall Street. This, effectively, meant that the CARES Act provided $1.346 trillion for average Americans and other purposes versus $4.54 trillion for Wall Street. In short, the assistance going to Wall Street was more than 3 times larger than that going to families and workers."
My apologies, I digress... I tend to do that when anyone mentions dah FED... oh that's right it was me. Well, anyway moving on... the outrageous scale of the theft on Wallstreet almost defies belief and is really only a reflection of the systemic rot that permeates the entire global private banking cartel.
My FED ramble was just an illustration of the U$ branch of the outrageous chaos. If you think you can handle the global perspective, maybe take the midnight train to Georgia in the links above... this attempts to put some kind of perspective on these horrendous global numbers. If we can absorb the staggering scale of these numbers, then surely this should help anyone of us vote with our feet.
Of course, at the end of the day, this is the result of handing the main global printing presses to a bunch of depraved thugs who would make the Cosa Nostra look like Mother Teresa. This is the funding base of Mr Global and we gave it to them on a plate... could we honestly expect anything other than this thieving steaming shithole?
Gee thanks Mr Putin, you have offered up humanity a choice... now let's see if we can muster up the room temperature level IQ required to make the correct choice. One that just might just give our species a snowball's chance in hell of survival.
Cheers and warmest regards
Col
PS Mathew, on the off chance you managed to get through to this point in this marathon, I wish to repeat... I am in awe of your work... I would love the opportunity to zoom with you someday and to have the opportunity to offer some good old fashioned street reporting from our little South Pacific corner of Natostan. Remember though we are not members... we're simply noisy little lapdogs.
Hey Colin. I very much enjoyed your contribution here and a short zoom would be doable in the coming weeks. Shoot me an email to schedule something at matt.ehret@tutamail.com
Well, I'll let Matthew answer you, since he seems to be your intended audience. That's very interesting info about the US being one of only 3 fully private CBs. I do wonder, with the 14 African nations under the African franc, which state owns their CB?
Also interesting about Nomura and Lehman's, whose financial records were conveniently buried in the rubble of Building Seven.
And to up the ante on the global skullduggery, the BIS sum of financial derivatives had a notional value of $700 TRILLION in 2013 with a global GDP of $78T. And I'm sure you already know they have superpriority in any bank bankruptcy.
- LEVEL FOUR A new Central Bank model that is totally Govt owned, has no outside affiliations or influences, and absolutely no association with the BIS whatsoever. This entity would have a very modest balance sheet and would only play a small role in working with Treasury in order to keep the monetary system running smoothly. All overseas debts owed to criminal banking entities would be cancelled. The only loans remaining to be honoured and paid off would be to legitimate non-criminal entities that are not part of the private banking cabal. These would be paid off quickly with a thriving new economy and money would never again be borrowed from overseas by OUR Govt.
- LEVEL FIVE The looming complete irrelevance of the BIS... WHOOP, WHOOP... this institution should never have existed anyway. This is the most evil banking institution in the history of mankind. This was the enormous blunder we made and why WW1 never really ended. The Banksters who caused the war and profited hugely got off scot-free none were held to account in the Nuremberg trials. In fact, they actually had their representatives in on the Bretton Woods meeting helping draw up the blueprint that would financially entrap Mainstreet for the next 3 generations. The cabal survived and still going, continually reinventing itself in different guises. The latest ones are the Covid variety and this now runs into the Ukraine debacle. Same old same old, they are all Bankster wars, class wars. The only difference is the endless imagination and deployment of new technologies that they use to butcher us in ever more innovative ways.
In relation to LEVEL 5 think the in terms of the People's Bank of China [the Chinese Central Bank]... Aha you say... but they are a BIS member, one of 63 worldwide... true, but I argue that they are members in name only. They are in spite of their membership the absolute polar opposite in everything the BIS promotes, including their ownership model, how money is created, and the fact that this is all about the fostering of productive capital, NOT THE RENTIER bubble-blowing model.
Clearly, as Mathew points out in his article, Glazyev being in charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union [EEU] is looking closely at the astonishing success of the Chinese CB model and the fact that it was critical in lifting more than 300 million people from poverty into middle-class financial status. At the same time, they raised the GDP of the country exponentially, without any significant inflation whatsoever.
The days of the Russian Central bank being influenced by its BIS membership status are clearly severely numbered... Glazyev spells it out for us in the quote Mathew referenced...
"The entire banking system in China is state-owned, it operates as a single development institution, directing cash flows to expand output and develop new technologies. In the United States, the money supply is used to finance the budget deficit and is reallocated to financial bubbles. As a result, the efficiency of the US financial and economic system is 20%... only one in five dollars reaches the real sector, and in China almost 90% (that is, almost all the yuan created by the Central Bank of the PRC) feed the contours of expanding production and ensure ultra-high economic growth.”
Now that Putin has the Fifth column elements pretty much under control I would say they will do a complete tangential move away from any BIS influence. Add to this the fact that it is patently ridiculous to retain any relationship when the BIS themselves in March 2022 announced a suspension of all dealings with Russia's central bank in compliance with the Natostan sanctions so-called international sanctions.
The ruble is no longer fiat anyway which renders the systems incompatible. The new 'basket of currencies' style trade only currency will be a multiple sovereign currency component trade instrument... this will not be fiat either. On the contrary it will be backed by some 20 different commodities including gold and energy... this is an entirely new paradigm... the polar opposite of a fiat-based single sovereign reserve currency.
Along with Russia and a host of other major countries the flight from fiat and the old financial paradigms, will be the nemeses of the BIS and its partners in crime. These include international predator club constructs such as the IMF and the WB. As I see it, China's membership is nothing more than a game of... 'for god's sake man, you must know your enemy'.
I think, Colin, you're making more work for yourself by taking on the imperial currencies and their central banks. With Glazyev in Eurasia and Obrador's move to create the Sur, foreign debts are kaput. The petrodollar was backed by foreign extraction; that will no longer be possible.
The third section of my book is World on FIRE, based on Michael Hudson's definition, and it includes Greece Lightning, Swept Away by the Currency (on Libya and the pan-African dinar), and The Petropocalypse. The fourth section is Attack of the Petrodactyls, with It Takes a Pillage: Detroit and its takedown by interest-swap derivatives, Valley of the Dollars, Finance is an Extractive Industry, and Suction Up, Trickle Down.
I imagine these billion-dollar vulture funds as swooping down on anything with a drop of blood in it. We in the consumer nations will be the last prey left. And we don't have a prayer unless we Balkanize our economies, so they have to expend more energy in propaganda and control than they would get back.
In the chapters Too Small to Fail and World Without Ends, I look at China's 1.35B people in 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities and special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. I look at Guangdong and its locked barracks and 14-hr days and the 4-5M child laborers in the economic zone, with elementary-age children who have quotas to braid 1000-10,000 strands of firecrackers a day, which periodically blow up.
Here in California, Chinese parents pay a year's rent in cash plus foreign tuition for their kids, while our kids work two jobs and take on unpayable debt for university. Our homes will be the first snapped up with Chinese treasury bills. It's generated wealth, yes, obscene wealth from the internal colonies. I think it's a lesson we should heed that size matters.
With fiat currency, don't throw out the baby with the IMF bathwater. Money is a means of organizing labor in the interests of whoever issues it. If the community is king, creating its money by fiat (backed by the mortgages and therefore labor of residents) is how you accomplish the 'what' that your local gov't wants to do.
Hope you're enjoying this conversation as much as I am ;-) I've now skipped a dance class just for this.
Hi Tereza... I am intrigued with your reference to "Obrador's move to create the Sur"... this jogged my memory. I remember Hugo Salinas Price's intiative a few years ago of extra silver currency being introduced into circulation as an incentive to promote and protect savings.
Of course once upon a time Mexico enjoyed an incredibly stable silver backed currency with negligible inflation for centuries... until a certain neighbouring country talked them out of it.
Is Obramor revisiting some variation of this... I haven't been able to find anything on this?
Gosh Tereza you sure keep me on my toes with my thinking cap on... love It !!!
Oh but rereading this, it's Lula de Silva who plans to create the Sur and Obrador is doing a lithium alliance:
"Multipolarista's Ben Norton reports that Former Brazilian president Lula da Silva, who is still favored to beat Bolsonaro in the nation's election later this year, has announced plans to create a Latin American currency called the "Sur" (South) in order to "be freed of the dollar." Lula is also making headlines today for his position that presidents Zelensky and Putin are both equally to blame for the war in Ukraine, and that the US and EU also share blame for the conflict.
"This comes at the same time the Mexican government begins promoting the idea of a Latin American lithium alliance. Bolivia's Kawsachun News reports that Mexico's president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has expressed his intention to form an alliance with major lithium nations Bolivia, Argentina and Chile for the mutual benefit of all nations involved. This could have major implications for the future due to the use of lithium batteries in smartphones, laptops and tablets, as well as electric cars.
"Latin America finally moving out of Washington's Monroe Doctrine sphere of domination and into its own collective sovereignty for its own benefit would be an earth-shaking historical development. That there appears to be some movement toward that end is both exciting and scary, because the US empire isn't known for peacefully allowing its vassals to simply move out from under its thumb. Either way, though, the fact that nations around the world are coming out against the empire with increasing boldness is hugely significant."
I'm so glad, Colin, and thanks for subscribing to my Substack, I recognized your email. Yes, now I'm trying to remember where I read about this. Oh, here it is from Caitlin Johnstone:
Great news, isn't that? At least for Latin America. Yes, I wrote about their last attempt to create the Sur in my book, along with the attempt at the IMF to create a basket of currencies. That got foiled by the claim that Strauss-Kahn forced his hotel maid to perform fellatio, for which they hauled him out of his plane and threw him into Rikers while the Nigerian maid had photo ops with high-priced lawyers. I remember Amy Goodman celebrating this "victory for women" and thinking, how naive.
She is one really brave lady just across the creek from me... and the most honest and outspoken commentator in Australasia.
I have followed her for years and admire her work but never commented because in her direct link [https://caitlinjohnstone.com/] I could never get any comments to load.
I see from your link she is on Substack too. I will access her writings that way from now on and have a go at commenting again ... hopefully SS might be more user friendly. It was probably just something I was doing wrong anyway... my techno skills are pretty ordinary.
I learn something every time we talk Tereza.
I will swot up on the 'Sur' now too as i am totally intrigued. The more models the merrier. Golly, there are so many challenges to everything Warshington tries now.
I love the fact that the U$ had to crawl back and try to court Venezuela after the Russian sanctions bit them in the arse.. And they still brazenly try it on even after they have done their level best to completely destroy that country.
Trump was arguably the worst offender... even appointing Iran-Contra raving psycho Elliot Abrams as Special Representative when they were attempting to instal the completely idiotic Guido as El Presidente.
The Latin American sandpit occupants are kicking sand in their eyes big time now... bring it on. The Monroe Doctrine will completely unravel as more countries embolden each other. This sort of behaviour is really catchy... WHOOP WHOOP!
Caitlin is so refreshingly blunt, isn't she? For my own taste, I would be less insulting to liberals--the term shitlib makes me cringe each time she uses it. But I think it's useful that someone is taking off the gloves and hitting bare-fisted.
Yes you should definitely comment on her Substack (which is working for you fine here). It's a really interesting group and I've lured several from there to mine. I quoted her many times in Russell Brand's comments before he started doing episodes on her--not that I'm taking credit, heh heh.
I'm glad you're equally excited about these moves. And yes, Michael Hudson has some great writing I quote in my book about Venezuela and how currency exchanges and dollar-denominated debt was used to undermine their economy.
There's an interesting link with Libya I found from Saman Mohammadi in his blog The Excavator. In 2011 Chavez announced he was nationalizing the gold mines and repatriating 160 tons of gold held in European banks worth $11B. They didn't have that much. But Tripoli had $10B. By April, Qaddafi's grandchildren were killed in a drone strike targeting him and in Oct the NATO airstrike, rectal rape by bayonet, and French assassin bullet left his body in an industrial freezer while the "insurgents in suits" set up a privately owned Central Bank of Benghazi. By the end of Nov, the first shipment of gold arrived in Venezuela.
Here we have a case of classic Sun Tzu strategy... if the enemy is doing everything wrong, for god's sake stay out of the way... just let them get on with it. Only arrive openly on the scene in time to assist them with their own final pathetic coup de grace. I have said all along... this debacle will end with both a bang and a whimper. [and all due apologies to Mr Eliot].
Locally Tereza, there is a lot of discussion in relation to your excellent point as to how we apply the Glazyev/Hudson principles at the micro-level. Here in the Bay of Islands region of the Far North we are running think tanks and workshops and are now seeing a genuine appetite with people actively looking for ways to starve the global private banking collective and to do so at every level possible.
They are starting at local individual bartering level and are now eager to hear strategies that challenge the entire gambit... right up to sovereign central banking, and the head of the creature, the global central bank of central banks... the Bank of International Settlements, in Basel Switzerland.
As I see it, the possibilities are much more easily visualised when you look at the developments top-down, since the reform at the pinnacle complements and encourages attainable goals at all other levels. This flows right down to the very base of the financial pyramid, the lowest level of which would be individual bartering of goods for goods. In fact, we have local crop swaps up and running here now actively doing just this.
This also in its own small way, disenfranchises the supermarket corporates who form an integral component of the Mr Global collective.... the same one that deploy six ways to Sunday to either butcher us, sicken us, or completely entrap us using every aspect of our lives.
I think given the 88:12 figure above, that the old financial kleptocracy and its agencies the BIS, the IMF, and the WB are going to wind down very rapidly into irrelevance as new parallel structures grow dramatically. The world is awakening to the reality of just how outrageous the financial pillaging had become under the old model.
This nightmare lasted for over a century and really began at a train station in New Jersey in 1913.
Through a series of events that consolidated the chokehold of this cartel, it morphed to a point where it basically financially terrorised and racketeered on a mind-numbing global level. The collective also underwrote perpetual war and terror which basically preyed on the entire globe.
In this link lies a story about a midnight train ride to Jekyll Island in Georgia. Follow it, take the ride, and trace the roots of exactly where this cancerous scourge began. It is not the link as such... you will find the the article as a comment under the link with the photo of the sinister Mansion where the plot was cooked up.
...and the screenshot so you can collect your ticket...
The con was so utterly complete that the habitual purchase of the hegemon's debt meant that the victims, to a huge degree, actually financed their very own individual and collective demise. Such was the scale of the fraud and so insidiously was it heisted on humanity, that to some degree it was almost akin to a global Stockholm Syndrome in play. When you look at events like 9/11, countless other viscous false flags, and the endless bag of tricks deployed, there is even an element of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy happening... this is psychopathic sicko behaviour on a global scale.
The entrenched financial con was of such staggering proportions that I honestly thought it would never be displaced... at least not in my lifetime anyway... never even in my wildest dreams. What I didn't factor in though, was just how utterly absurd this apparent death wish would become. It is now abundantly clear that these ghoulish retards don't even have a plan B. They bet the farm on the fact that they could intimidate the combined weight of Russia and China into letting them keep their hegemony... they will lose badly.
Now the worst of the western rabid neocons have ramped up the "Russia/China bad" mantra to such a hysterical level that there is no way they can back down now without complete loss of face, not to mention the entire battle itself. Soon Natostan will have to show their hand... odds on it will be little more than a pair of twos... that's if they don't kick over the card table instead... in order to simply hide what they don't actually have anyway.
This entire debacle ending in tragedy is precisely what you would expect with a procession of imbeciles in the western halls of power. Over the decades they have become increasingly debauched and inept. In the theatre of the utterly absurd the procession of imbecilic incompetence simply beggars belief.
Take the Bushs, the Obombers, the Clintons, the Pompeos, the Abrams, the Nulands, the Truss's, the Bidens, the Blairs... when it comes down to an outright contest in levels or blends of butchery, evil, and flat-out total incompetence, who amongst us can even try to pick clear winners.
What is absolutely certain is that the standard became so utterly appalling that the zone B countries finally gave up ever aspiring to become agreement or treaty capable... how could they with this never-ending queue of western idiocy. The patience of Putin and Lavrov with their seemingly endless states-man-like behaviour, finally ran out last month They finally accepted the fact that any dialogue with Natostan was simply wasted time, energy, and patience, and that there was only one language that they would ever comprehend.
Putin's gold put was the first financial salvo fired and it comes just as the hegemon was really beginning to stagger from his own self-inflicted injuries. How dumb can you get... the fact is that they had long since decided to weaponise their reserve currency and this alone was a flat-out suicidal blunder....perhaps there should be no great surprise there either... after all, what don't these idiotic thugs attempt to weaponise.
Of course, what I call the Troika... Putin, Glazyev and Lavrov, only had to begin with one single perfectly choreographed, legitimate and legal action [the gold put]... the remainder of the heavy lifting will now be shared amongst the increasing number of major countries when it finally dawns on them that they have a viable and functional escape from the old hegemonic 'order'. They will exit the petrodollar, and US treasuries in absolute droves as they flock to a new construct that they are confident will not be weaponised.
So what are these different levels and tools that we can all as a team deploy in order to disenfranchise the Frankenstein-like creature? That's the one that crawled out of Jekyll Island, spawned of course by the old Anglo European family dynasties that masterminded and then cultivated this entire construct for over one hundred years...
- LEVEL ONE Direct barter of crops, goods and services. Local currencies created... there are some 200 successful models in France alone. Use of cash as much as possible. Careful use of crypto-currencies that are not Govt centralised or controlled.
- LEVEL TWO Development of Coop structured banks that are small and regional. They would have very local and pro-active oversight and support and advice, with effective moral hazard based safeguards that avoid delinquencies. These are not debt-based and the loans are made using the backing of the local public assets or, for instance in Maori group ownership, the assets that are on the balance sheet of their financial entity. There is no third party or shareholders raking off profits. The Bank is the members themselves... they gain all the rewards. Loans can be made at affordable rates and wealthy locals can support their area by opening up interest-bearing deposit accounts. This is a complete departure from a rentier style [aka neofeudalistic] model into one that invests capital in creating goods and services and not in blowing asset bubbles. This model is proven to provide negligible inflation. There is actually a good incentive for the wealthy to have these savings accounts from an interest point of view, as well as to provide the comforting feeling that they are in effect investing in their local region as well as their families and future generations.
- LEVEL THREE Large cooperative development banks. Once again loans and money backed by tangible assets and not created out of thin air as debt. These can provide then funding for large infrastructural projects. These projects would all be completed at around half the total cost of these projects with the traditional funding sources. The backing for
- making these effectively zero interest loans would be state-owned assets. Think of places like North Dakota or China for active working models, some of which have been successful for more than a century.
Yes! The primary objection to my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, has been "how is this going to come about?" And now we have the empire dismantling itself at freefall speed, bringing with it a world of hurt for those 12% in NATOstan with no one to blame but their rulers. So it leaves us in the foreseeable future in a position to only bring good out of the wreckage, if we have a plan.
If you are not yet married to your plan, I really hope you will date mine. We agree totally in the definition of the problem, which is huge. I write about Jeckyll Island and the shenanigans that got the Federal Reserve Act passed on Christmas Eve eve, with almost no one in Congress and its greatest opponent, William Jennings Bryan, praising it because it was worded so obscurely. I talk about the third-party candidate trick that got Taft elected, who they knew would sign it. These things alone should make it rescindable, in a court concerned with justice--for which I wouldn't hold my breath.
What you describe in Phase One are fine things to do, and things I've been involved with for a couple of decades. But, as I talk about in my last YT (still writing the text for Substack version), they don't change the system. My plan, which I'll describe for the US, capitalizes community-owned public banks with the Social Security Trust Fund, gives it and long-term savings a high rate of interest--possible because banks can issue 10X their capital, rescinds the right of private banks to loan money they don't have, pushes a community credit that I call carets into monthly targeted subsidies for locally produced food, wellcare, education & home improvements (thereby stimulating the local economy), and makes locally spent carets free of taxes except for SS but uses a 2:1 exchange rate for dollars to carets and taxes carets to dollars at 50%. So community residents have double the advantage in buying housing (over hedge funds) and in competing with foreign-made products.
We both know the dollar is tanking. Sun Tzu is right, leave it alone. But in the immortal words of the Godfather, leave the money, take the assets (it was something like that, yeah?) My plan uses eminent domain to buy them back and get extractive industries turned into local co-ops. And yes, I write extensively about N Dakota (from my contributions to a collaborative text on public banking) and also some about China. We're on the same page, but I think this can be done in a decentralized way that would protect it from being wrapped up in a big red bow and carried off by the next troika (a term Greece used for the European Commission, IMF & European Central Bank).
Hi Tereza... I Love your comment and your great question.
JUST TO PREFACE... I am enormously impressed with Mathew
Ehret's work... only relatively recently becoming aware of the full extent of it, and how he can collate so many, seemingly at times, almost random unrelated global events. Mathew has this unique gift where he can pluck them out of the swirling mists and arrange them into something tangible, cohesive, and utterly understandable for the masses.
His moulding of vitally important historical events, with modern geopolitics, is IMO exemplary. For his age or any age for that matter, it is just flat out astonishing. His ability to illustrate the abject tragedies that have happened along the way... which by the way are sometimes long forgotten by so many of us [case in point Alfred Herrhausen]. These instances spotlight missed opportunities and how on so many occasions the world could well have been utterly transformed into a completely new thriving reality... a place that had the cooperative good of the masses as the priority, whilst the wants of the obscene kleptocrats could have been banished into almost complete irrelevance.
I am also a huge fan of Michael Hudson, Pepe Escobar, and also Fabio Vighi's analysis too. [Fabio is a Prof of Critical thinking at Cardiff Uni.] With Mathew rounding out the foursome, this is an absolutely fabulous treasure trove of wisdom and intellect.
And now my 2 cents worth from NZ, and an attempt to answer to Tereza's question... and quite frankly if someone doesn't answer it satisfactorily, and very soon, then humanity is all but lost... at least in any sustainable form.
I am trying desperately to keep my cup at the very least half full. In order to do that I have to accept the enormity of the tragedy that has already occurred and also what is yet to unfold. However, the truly uplifting thing for me is to endeavour to come up with a coherent plan and a chart with waypoints to follow on a journey towards a defined endpoint. This is empowerment and inspiration for myself and hopefully for many others. It is as much an intellectual journey as anything else and a realisation we are duty-bound to make our own individual contributions.
Perhaps singer, songwriter, and extraordinary wordsmith, Leonard Cohen said it best with these words in his signature song 'Anthem'...
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
I like to think that at any stage in the future I will be able to outline my contribution and to hold my head high because I did at least try to come up with solutions and not just resort to endlessly parroting the problems of the day.
When my beautiful grand-daughters ask me the question... what did you do Poppa?... I want to be able to answer them with genuine pride. So too, I don't even want to contemplate them enduring a future that is a modern-day techno-version of a commy gulag.
I visualise the situation very simplistically and accept the fact that humanity has been subject to ever ratcheted up financial terrorism, and that this must be addressed at the very highest level... otherwise, we are really only rearranging deck chairs.
I try to compartmentalise the individual problems. Trying to absorb the entire mess in one sitting is a giant step too far. My strategy is to look at each problem individually and to try to brainstorm a solution for each individual challenge before moving on to the next.
If you bring in enough resources to the table all of these problems are solvable. The vital thing is to collate these solutions so that they appear as individual jigsaw pieces that can then be assembled to reveal the full picture. The wonderful thing is the outcome is not necessarily the proverbial train-wreck... what I envisage is actually precisely the opposite.
So here I am genuinely excited and uplifted in regard to the developments in the last month in terms of new global financial and trading instruments emerging that are already replacing the broken and utterly corrupt status quo.
The single guarantee in this completely uncharted territory will be the immensely destructive global economic fallout. However, emerging out of the financial carnage, I visualise an exciting new economic renaissance. This will be the eventual reward to at least partially compensate for the excruciating birthing process. Mr Global's financial construct was never ever going to exit quietly off-stage and simply slide away into the night. The biggest unknown is to just what extent these craven lunatics will resort to the Samson option.
So much is happening at so many levels, but arguably the most telling statistic of all is about 'Natostan'... as Pepe Escobar refers to the group, which is in essence really just Financial Zone A. They have just succeeded admirably in isolating Russia from somewhere around a paltry 12% of the world population. Of course they didn't "just isolate" them... they were already completely hysterical Russia/Sinophobes. This latest complete Dunkirk lookalike follow on on from very recent debacles in Iran, Afghanistan and Kazakstan is the game-changer, and it has happened at truly breathtaking pace.
Spin this boomerang another way... Financial Zone A has pretty much burnt most of its bridges already, with a truly staggering 88% of the world population deserting for vastly greener pastures. I am ashamed to say that, NZ, just like Australia [although neither country is a NATO member] however, both countries are fully supportive of this completely idiotic death-cult-like behaviour. We are akin to pathetic chihuahua lapdogs barking from behind the heals of what was once a monolithic hegemon.
Colin, I'm honored that you chose my comment to write your magnum opus in response to ;-) I'm going to savor it and respond to each (in the order written) before reading the others, because you've put in so many juicy and tantalizing places to jump off!
First, what a BEAUTIFUL testimony to Matthew's work! Your praise is so perceptive in looking at the way he discerns the patterns. And I share your enthusiasm for Michael Hudson, my favorite economist, Pepe Escobar, and Leonard Cohen, perhaps my favorite songwriter. If there are links to Fabio Vighi's work, please share them.
And I love that Matthew focuses on times when things could have gone another way, which I didn't recognize until you pointed it out. I had first considered calling my book Missed Pivots, because I look at the same thing. I think it's important to recognize how many near-misses there have been, and what deflected them. I go back 3500 yrs to the origins of democracy, that thwarted an anarchy of slaves, colonized and landless in exchange for hierarchy (the inheritance order of the archons). I look at Ben Franklin's colonial economic system that made poverty obsolete, and how it was thwarted by the British Currency Act. And then I look at Shay's Rebellion and how one intercepted message defeated it, leading to a Constitution written by merchants and bankers. The Populist Rebellion and free silver was another close call for capitalism.
Yes, I absolutely agree that the goal is "a coherent plan and a chart with waypoints to follow on a journey towards a defined endpoint." That's what my book is, and I'm dying for someone to take it seriously or tell me why they have a more foolproof plan ;-)
And I'm totally with you that my 12% of the world's population being suddenly left to our own devices is scary and exhilarating as hell! Your chihuahua metaphor is apt.
All good Tereza... I will be following your work with huge interest. I will put an order in for all your books today and read up ASAP... I am gobsmacked that I have missed them! Clearly there will be many things that you have picked up on that I am not aware of yet.
I have tried to get a really productive think-tank going down here in NZ and although we have lots of ideas at the local level we really struggle with finding knowledgeable people to brainstorm on possible solutions and models at the macro and central bank level. I don't even bother with any of our local academics... clearly their narratives have been captured by Mr Global anyway.
I am not fixed in my theories in any way and find myself still learning every day... I find new ideas tremendously exciting and see myself as a banking model nurd as well as a self confessed information sponge.
I am also working with a group on Governance models that are immune from financial lobby and which can actually become functional democracies that fit beautifully with the coop/state banking models.
The model that I have the most faith in is based on direct recall where our representatives in parliament answer directly to their local constituents and can be removed at any stage of their term. Party manifestos basically are non existent and any green type ideas for example come from local concerns on the environment, not from any global green lobby that has been infiltrated by sinister global agendas.
If you want to zoom or Whatsap some time just let me know... I left my email address in one of the other messages. It will great to be able to bounce ideas around together.
You're in luck Colin that I only have one book out ;-) I did get the Substack version out today of What Is the Greater Reset? And, inspired by your points, I elaborated on my plan quite a bit at the end. So I'd recommend that and the previous, Build a New Model, for the universal principles of a community-based economy, that would apply equally in NZ. I look forward to chatting more!
Quick note to both Colin and Tereza: I just wanted to state that I am really impressed to read through the high quality discussion you guys put forth and feel honored that my article provoked the fruitful exchange. It's very much a keeper.
I read your latest Substack article that features the BRI projects, the current status of CPEC, and the current work of Minister Sergei Glazyev. This meshes well with your Lee Rockwell appearance this weekend and your lecture on the span from St. Augustine to Thomas More.
You used the terms “parasite” and “host” to describe the Babylonian-Venetians and the places where they decamped.
I note that Prof. Michael Hudson, a scholar of debt relations going back to Sumer, wrote books entitled “Killing the Host” and “And Forgive Them Their Debts”, which addressed debt history and the centrality of debt forgiveness to Judaism (before Hillel) and Christianity. See Leviticus 25:10, Isaiah 61:1-4, and Luke Chapter 4 (Jesus’ first sermon in a synagogue).
I make the case again to pursue synergistic discussion with Michael Hudson. He considers Minister Glazyev as an ally in Modern Monetary Theory. I dare say that Minister Glazyev has applied “Superimperialism” and “Global Fracture” in real time.
Thank you very much again for the work you are doing to induce me to know myself, learn how I think, focus on Ideas and Spirit, and improve myself in humanity.
The article takes my thoughts back to Greece, when the country changed to the euro and was plunged into debt, Greece had many assets, therefore how could they be enslaved into a system which instantaneously destroyed their economy. Greece relied on tourism as part of their economy therefore their own monetary system became stronger in the summer months and weakened during the winter which balanced the economy. Around 1990, the E.U. brought out a directive which stated car manufacturers had to pay compensation to franchise companies if the manufacturers decided to terminate a franchise company, which would become law within two years, what happened, most all of the car manufacturers terminated hundreds of small and medium sized franchises before the directive became law. Is the Public Sector destroying the Private Sector ? The public sector at one time was there to look after the public services and the private sector was there to build the profits making tax to sustain the public sector. Some public sector salaries have increased well beyond the cost of living, while profits and salaries have become unsustainable in many private companies. Have governments in the West aligned themselves more with the E.U. building their own private sector while stripping the assets of the Western countries ? Are some Charity Foundations giving extraordinary amounts of money to many sectors to push an agenda which will have catastrophic consequences to the balance of the economy and life itself ? Due to E.U. rules and regulations many farmers rely on subsidies, what if those subsidies were held back, would the farmers lose their farms, only to be bought up by those who held back the payments ? Are we in a situation where the system is being damaged from within, should the Justice System be applying the rule of law by protecting our Fundamental Laws and Constitutional Rights ? The fiat currency has been abused, the NWO total reset is not the answer, as that amounts to enslavement, the future can be much brighter for all, once the damage has been dismantled.
Yes! I did an episode on this Glazyev interview called The West vs The Rest. I concur with PJ that Hudson (on whom I've done several episodes) asked a very interesting question about dollarized debts, and Glazyev's answer (that there was no need to repay them) was revolutionary. It's a little breathtaking to see the trends I identified in my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, reach fruition at such breakneck speed. I'm so glad that you're reporting on them.
The conclusion in my book was taking the principles of Glazyev / Hudson and figuring out how to apply them on a micro-scale. I talk about this in today's YouTube, Build a New Model. I'll post the link to the Substack when it's finished. It's an exciting time, despite the turmoil, but those of us who live under imperial currencies need to protect our community assets because they'll be the only things left to grab!
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-west-vs-the-rest
https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607/
https://youtu.be/a1aCZet_XG4
contin...In all of this maze of CB models the most puzzling thing to try to come to terms with is that the true policy independence of Central Banks has little, if anything, to do with ownership. I want to scream every time I hear the false mantra that all central banks are owned by the Rothchilds... this is patently untrue.
There are only 3 CBs in which all of the shares are owned entirely by private owners. The vast majority of the remainder have 100% ownership of the shares by the Govt.
Those of note that are not 100% state-owned are listed here...
Country Government Ownership %
United States 0%
Italy 0%
South Africa 0%
Greece 35%
Belgium 50%
Switzerland 51%
Turkey 51%
Japan 55%
San Marino 67%
The only real certainty I can think of is that if a CB is totally privately owned then there would be less than a snowball's chance in hell of any semblance of independence. Business is business, and it is patently obvious that it will be the owners and their cronies that their policy serves primarily. Given that the most common mandates involve inflation and unemployment, and these are so easily manipulated, even the mandates can easily be rendered farcical.
Add to the mix the fact that these CBs are protected from audit and it becomes child's play for blatant theft to occur on a massive scale. So too with market-making, outrageous balance sheet expansions, and dodgy instruments that allow for all manner of indiscretions to be hidden off books and the sky is the limit.
Spend half an hour from time to time reading Pam and Ross Martens wallstreetonparade.com and the amount of chicanery that occurs in broad daylight just simply beggars belief. Remember too that the US taxpayer is on the hook for 98% of the FEDs balance sheet... also that in 2008 their balance sheet stood at less than $1 trillion... today it is around $9 trillion.
And look at this Deauzy and the star borrower in cumulative Repo loans [overnight and short term loans] at a mind-numbing $3.7 trillion... Nomura. And who is, you might well ask is Nomura?... why none other than the corporation that swallowed up the Asian division of Lehman's when they went tits up in 2008.
Just the blatant skulduggery during Trump's reign simply beggared belief. The long and the short of it was by inventing SPVs [Special Purpose Vehicles] and goodness knows what other financial chicanery.
...here is just a small taste quoted from the link...
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/05/the-fed-hasnt-spent-a-dime-yet-for-main-street-versus-735-billion-for-wall-street/
"The stimulus bill known as the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) was signed into law by President Donald Trump on March 27. Among its many features (such as direct checks to struggling Americans and enhancing unemployment compensation by $600 per week for four months to unemployed workers so they could pay their rent and buy food) the bill also carved out a dubious $454 billion (or 25 percent of the total $1.8 trillion spending package) for the U.S. Treasury to hand over to the Federal Reserve. This was the Faustian Bargain the Democrats had to agree to in order to get the deal approved by the Wall Street cronies in the Senate.
If you subtract the $454 billion from the $1.8 trillion total spending package, that left $1.346 trillion for other purposes. But the $454 billion wasn’t really just $454 billion. It was going to be leveraged up by a factor of 10 to 1 into a $4.54 trillion bailout for Wall Street. This, effectively, meant that the CARES Act provided $1.346 trillion for average Americans and other purposes versus $4.54 trillion for Wall Street. In short, the assistance going to Wall Street was more than 3 times larger than that going to families and workers."
My apologies, I digress... I tend to do that when anyone mentions dah FED... oh that's right it was me. Well, anyway moving on... the outrageous scale of the theft on Wallstreet almost defies belief and is really only a reflection of the systemic rot that permeates the entire global private banking cartel.
My FED ramble was just an illustration of the U$ branch of the outrageous chaos. If you think you can handle the global perspective, maybe take the midnight train to Georgia in the links above... this attempts to put some kind of perspective on these horrendous global numbers. If we can absorb the staggering scale of these numbers, then surely this should help anyone of us vote with our feet.
Of course, at the end of the day, this is the result of handing the main global printing presses to a bunch of depraved thugs who would make the Cosa Nostra look like Mother Teresa. This is the funding base of Mr Global and we gave it to them on a plate... could we honestly expect anything other than this thieving steaming shithole?
Gee thanks Mr Putin, you have offered up humanity a choice... now let's see if we can muster up the room temperature level IQ required to make the correct choice. One that just might just give our species a snowball's chance in hell of survival.
Cheers and warmest regards
Col
PS Mathew, on the off chance you managed to get through to this point in this marathon, I wish to repeat... I am in awe of your work... I would love the opportunity to zoom with you someday and to have the opportunity to offer some good old fashioned street reporting from our little South Pacific corner of Natostan. Remember though we are not members... we're simply noisy little lapdogs.
email colin@matauriangus.com
Hey Colin. I very much enjoyed your contribution here and a short zoom would be doable in the coming weeks. Shoot me an email to schedule something at matt.ehret@tutamail.com
Well, I'll let Matthew answer you, since he seems to be your intended audience. That's very interesting info about the US being one of only 3 fully private CBs. I do wonder, with the 14 African nations under the African franc, which state owns their CB?
Also interesting about Nomura and Lehman's, whose financial records were conveniently buried in the rubble of Building Seven.
And to up the ante on the global skullduggery, the BIS sum of financial derivatives had a notional value of $700 TRILLION in 2013 with a global GDP of $78T. And I'm sure you already know they have superpriority in any bank bankruptcy.
Cheers!
contin...
- LEVEL FOUR A new Central Bank model that is totally Govt owned, has no outside affiliations or influences, and absolutely no association with the BIS whatsoever. This entity would have a very modest balance sheet and would only play a small role in working with Treasury in order to keep the monetary system running smoothly. All overseas debts owed to criminal banking entities would be cancelled. The only loans remaining to be honoured and paid off would be to legitimate non-criminal entities that are not part of the private banking cabal. These would be paid off quickly with a thriving new economy and money would never again be borrowed from overseas by OUR Govt.
- LEVEL FIVE The looming complete irrelevance of the BIS... WHOOP, WHOOP... this institution should never have existed anyway. This is the most evil banking institution in the history of mankind. This was the enormous blunder we made and why WW1 never really ended. The Banksters who caused the war and profited hugely got off scot-free none were held to account in the Nuremberg trials. In fact, they actually had their representatives in on the Bretton Woods meeting helping draw up the blueprint that would financially entrap Mainstreet for the next 3 generations. The cabal survived and still going, continually reinventing itself in different guises. The latest ones are the Covid variety and this now runs into the Ukraine debacle. Same old same old, they are all Bankster wars, class wars. The only difference is the endless imagination and deployment of new technologies that they use to butcher us in ever more innovative ways.
In relation to LEVEL 5 think the in terms of the People's Bank of China [the Chinese Central Bank]... Aha you say... but they are a BIS member, one of 63 worldwide... true, but I argue that they are members in name only. They are in spite of their membership the absolute polar opposite in everything the BIS promotes, including their ownership model, how money is created, and the fact that this is all about the fostering of productive capital, NOT THE RENTIER bubble-blowing model.
Clearly, as Mathew points out in his article, Glazyev being in charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union [EEU] is looking closely at the astonishing success of the Chinese CB model and the fact that it was critical in lifting more than 300 million people from poverty into middle-class financial status. At the same time, they raised the GDP of the country exponentially, without any significant inflation whatsoever.
The days of the Russian Central bank being influenced by its BIS membership status are clearly severely numbered... Glazyev spells it out for us in the quote Mathew referenced...
"The entire banking system in China is state-owned, it operates as a single development institution, directing cash flows to expand output and develop new technologies. In the United States, the money supply is used to finance the budget deficit and is reallocated to financial bubbles. As a result, the efficiency of the US financial and economic system is 20%... only one in five dollars reaches the real sector, and in China almost 90% (that is, almost all the yuan created by the Central Bank of the PRC) feed the contours of expanding production and ensure ultra-high economic growth.”
Now that Putin has the Fifth column elements pretty much under control I would say they will do a complete tangential move away from any BIS influence. Add to this the fact that it is patently ridiculous to retain any relationship when the BIS themselves in March 2022 announced a suspension of all dealings with Russia's central bank in compliance with the Natostan sanctions so-called international sanctions.
The ruble is no longer fiat anyway which renders the systems incompatible. The new 'basket of currencies' style trade only currency will be a multiple sovereign currency component trade instrument... this will not be fiat either. On the contrary it will be backed by some 20 different commodities including gold and energy... this is an entirely new paradigm... the polar opposite of a fiat-based single sovereign reserve currency.
Along with Russia and a host of other major countries the flight from fiat and the old financial paradigms, will be the nemeses of the BIS and its partners in crime. These include international predator club constructs such as the IMF and the WB. As I see it, China's membership is nothing more than a game of... 'for god's sake man, you must know your enemy'.
I think, Colin, you're making more work for yourself by taking on the imperial currencies and their central banks. With Glazyev in Eurasia and Obrador's move to create the Sur, foreign debts are kaput. The petrodollar was backed by foreign extraction; that will no longer be possible.
The third section of my book is World on FIRE, based on Michael Hudson's definition, and it includes Greece Lightning, Swept Away by the Currency (on Libya and the pan-African dinar), and The Petropocalypse. The fourth section is Attack of the Petrodactyls, with It Takes a Pillage: Detroit and its takedown by interest-swap derivatives, Valley of the Dollars, Finance is an Extractive Industry, and Suction Up, Trickle Down.
I imagine these billion-dollar vulture funds as swooping down on anything with a drop of blood in it. We in the consumer nations will be the last prey left. And we don't have a prayer unless we Balkanize our economies, so they have to expend more energy in propaganda and control than they would get back.
In the chapters Too Small to Fail and World Without Ends, I look at China's 1.35B people in 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities and special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. I look at Guangdong and its locked barracks and 14-hr days and the 4-5M child laborers in the economic zone, with elementary-age children who have quotas to braid 1000-10,000 strands of firecrackers a day, which periodically blow up.
Here in California, Chinese parents pay a year's rent in cash plus foreign tuition for their kids, while our kids work two jobs and take on unpayable debt for university. Our homes will be the first snapped up with Chinese treasury bills. It's generated wealth, yes, obscene wealth from the internal colonies. I think it's a lesson we should heed that size matters.
With fiat currency, don't throw out the baby with the IMF bathwater. Money is a means of organizing labor in the interests of whoever issues it. If the community is king, creating its money by fiat (backed by the mortgages and therefore labor of residents) is how you accomplish the 'what' that your local gov't wants to do.
Hope you're enjoying this conversation as much as I am ;-) I've now skipped a dance class just for this.
Hi Tereza... I am intrigued with your reference to "Obrador's move to create the Sur"... this jogged my memory. I remember Hugo Salinas Price's intiative a few years ago of extra silver currency being introduced into circulation as an incentive to promote and protect savings.
Of course once upon a time Mexico enjoyed an incredibly stable silver backed currency with negligible inflation for centuries... until a certain neighbouring country talked them out of it.
Is Obramor revisiting some variation of this... I haven't been able to find anything on this?
Gosh Tereza you sure keep me on my toes with my thinking cap on... love It !!!
Oh but rereading this, it's Lula de Silva who plans to create the Sur and Obrador is doing a lithium alliance:
"Multipolarista's Ben Norton reports that Former Brazilian president Lula da Silva, who is still favored to beat Bolsonaro in the nation's election later this year, has announced plans to create a Latin American currency called the "Sur" (South) in order to "be freed of the dollar." Lula is also making headlines today for his position that presidents Zelensky and Putin are both equally to blame for the war in Ukraine, and that the US and EU also share blame for the conflict.
"This comes at the same time the Mexican government begins promoting the idea of a Latin American lithium alliance. Bolivia's Kawsachun News reports that Mexico's president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has expressed his intention to form an alliance with major lithium nations Bolivia, Argentina and Chile for the mutual benefit of all nations involved. This could have major implications for the future due to the use of lithium batteries in smartphones, laptops and tablets, as well as electric cars.
"Latin America finally moving out of Washington's Monroe Doctrine sphere of domination and into its own collective sovereignty for its own benefit would be an earth-shaking historical development. That there appears to be some movement toward that end is both exciting and scary, because the US empire isn't known for peacefully allowing its vassals to simply move out from under its thumb. Either way, though, the fact that nations around the world are coming out against the empire with increasing boldness is hugely significant."
Fabulous information Tereza. Thanks for bringing this to my attention
I'm so glad, Colin, and thanks for subscribing to my Substack, I recognized your email. Yes, now I'm trying to remember where I read about this. Oh, here it is from Caitlin Johnstone:
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/empire-news-roundup-latin-american
Great news, isn't that? At least for Latin America. Yes, I wrote about their last attempt to create the Sur in my book, along with the attempt at the IMF to create a basket of currencies. That got foiled by the claim that Strauss-Kahn forced his hotel maid to perform fellatio, for which they hauled him out of his plane and threw him into Rikers while the Nigerian maid had photo ops with high-priced lawyers. I remember Amy Goodman celebrating this "victory for women" and thinking, how naive.
I'm blown away that you follow CJ too Tereza!
She is one really brave lady just across the creek from me... and the most honest and outspoken commentator in Australasia.
I have followed her for years and admire her work but never commented because in her direct link [https://caitlinjohnstone.com/] I could never get any comments to load.
I see from your link she is on Substack too. I will access her writings that way from now on and have a go at commenting again ... hopefully SS might be more user friendly. It was probably just something I was doing wrong anyway... my techno skills are pretty ordinary.
I learn something every time we talk Tereza.
I will swot up on the 'Sur' now too as i am totally intrigued. The more models the merrier. Golly, there are so many challenges to everything Warshington tries now.
I love the fact that the U$ had to crawl back and try to court Venezuela after the Russian sanctions bit them in the arse.. And they still brazenly try it on even after they have done their level best to completely destroy that country.
Trump was arguably the worst offender... even appointing Iran-Contra raving psycho Elliot Abrams as Special Representative when they were attempting to instal the completely idiotic Guido as El Presidente.
The Latin American sandpit occupants are kicking sand in their eyes big time now... bring it on. The Monroe Doctrine will completely unravel as more countries embolden each other. This sort of behaviour is really catchy... WHOOP WHOOP!
Caitlin is so refreshingly blunt, isn't she? For my own taste, I would be less insulting to liberals--the term shitlib makes me cringe each time she uses it. But I think it's useful that someone is taking off the gloves and hitting bare-fisted.
Yes you should definitely comment on her Substack (which is working for you fine here). It's a really interesting group and I've lured several from there to mine. I quoted her many times in Russell Brand's comments before he started doing episodes on her--not that I'm taking credit, heh heh.
I'm glad you're equally excited about these moves. And yes, Michael Hudson has some great writing I quote in my book about Venezuela and how currency exchanges and dollar-denominated debt was used to undermine their economy.
There's an interesting link with Libya I found from Saman Mohammadi in his blog The Excavator. In 2011 Chavez announced he was nationalizing the gold mines and repatriating 160 tons of gold held in European banks worth $11B. They didn't have that much. But Tripoli had $10B. By April, Qaddafi's grandchildren were killed in a drone strike targeting him and in Oct the NATO airstrike, rectal rape by bayonet, and French assassin bullet left his body in an industrial freezer while the "insurgents in suits" set up a privately owned Central Bank of Benghazi. By the end of Nov, the first shipment of gold arrived in Venezuela.
Here we have a case of classic Sun Tzu strategy... if the enemy is doing everything wrong, for god's sake stay out of the way... just let them get on with it. Only arrive openly on the scene in time to assist them with their own final pathetic coup de grace. I have said all along... this debacle will end with both a bang and a whimper. [and all due apologies to Mr Eliot].
Locally Tereza, there is a lot of discussion in relation to your excellent point as to how we apply the Glazyev/Hudson principles at the micro-level. Here in the Bay of Islands region of the Far North we are running think tanks and workshops and are now seeing a genuine appetite with people actively looking for ways to starve the global private banking collective and to do so at every level possible.
They are starting at local individual bartering level and are now eager to hear strategies that challenge the entire gambit... right up to sovereign central banking, and the head of the creature, the global central bank of central banks... the Bank of International Settlements, in Basel Switzerland.
As I see it, the possibilities are much more easily visualised when you look at the developments top-down, since the reform at the pinnacle complements and encourages attainable goals at all other levels. This flows right down to the very base of the financial pyramid, the lowest level of which would be individual bartering of goods for goods. In fact, we have local crop swaps up and running here now actively doing just this.
This also in its own small way, disenfranchises the supermarket corporates who form an integral component of the Mr Global collective.... the same one that deploy six ways to Sunday to either butcher us, sicken us, or completely entrap us using every aspect of our lives.
I think given the 88:12 figure above, that the old financial kleptocracy and its agencies the BIS, the IMF, and the WB are going to wind down very rapidly into irrelevance as new parallel structures grow dramatically. The world is awakening to the reality of just how outrageous the financial pillaging had become under the old model.
This nightmare lasted for over a century and really began at a train station in New Jersey in 1913.
Through a series of events that consolidated the chokehold of this cartel, it morphed to a point where it basically financially terrorised and racketeered on a mind-numbing global level. The collective also underwrote perpetual war and terror which basically preyed on the entire globe.
In this link lies a story about a midnight train ride to Jekyll Island in Georgia. Follow it, take the ride, and trace the roots of exactly where this cancerous scourge began. It is not the link as such... you will find the the article as a comment under the link with the photo of the sinister Mansion where the plot was cooked up.
https://www.bassettbrashandhide.com/post/don-brash-adrian-orr-has-a-major-inflation-issue-on-his-plate
...and the screenshot so you can collect your ticket...
The con was so utterly complete that the habitual purchase of the hegemon's debt meant that the victims, to a huge degree, actually financed their very own individual and collective demise. Such was the scale of the fraud and so insidiously was it heisted on humanity, that to some degree it was almost akin to a global Stockholm Syndrome in play. When you look at events like 9/11, countless other viscous false flags, and the endless bag of tricks deployed, there is even an element of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy happening... this is psychopathic sicko behaviour on a global scale.
The entrenched financial con was of such staggering proportions that I honestly thought it would never be displaced... at least not in my lifetime anyway... never even in my wildest dreams. What I didn't factor in though, was just how utterly absurd this apparent death wish would become. It is now abundantly clear that these ghoulish retards don't even have a plan B. They bet the farm on the fact that they could intimidate the combined weight of Russia and China into letting them keep their hegemony... they will lose badly.
Now the worst of the western rabid neocons have ramped up the "Russia/China bad" mantra to such a hysterical level that there is no way they can back down now without complete loss of face, not to mention the entire battle itself. Soon Natostan will have to show their hand... odds on it will be little more than a pair of twos... that's if they don't kick over the card table instead... in order to simply hide what they don't actually have anyway.
This entire debacle ending in tragedy is precisely what you would expect with a procession of imbeciles in the western halls of power. Over the decades they have become increasingly debauched and inept. In the theatre of the utterly absurd the procession of imbecilic incompetence simply beggars belief.
Take the Bushs, the Obombers, the Clintons, the Pompeos, the Abrams, the Nulands, the Truss's, the Bidens, the Blairs... when it comes down to an outright contest in levels or blends of butchery, evil, and flat-out total incompetence, who amongst us can even try to pick clear winners.
What is absolutely certain is that the standard became so utterly appalling that the zone B countries finally gave up ever aspiring to become agreement or treaty capable... how could they with this never-ending queue of western idiocy. The patience of Putin and Lavrov with their seemingly endless states-man-like behaviour, finally ran out last month They finally accepted the fact that any dialogue with Natostan was simply wasted time, energy, and patience, and that there was only one language that they would ever comprehend.
Putin's gold put was the first financial salvo fired and it comes just as the hegemon was really beginning to stagger from his own self-inflicted injuries. How dumb can you get... the fact is that they had long since decided to weaponise their reserve currency and this alone was a flat-out suicidal blunder....perhaps there should be no great surprise there either... after all, what don't these idiotic thugs attempt to weaponise.
Of course, what I call the Troika... Putin, Glazyev and Lavrov, only had to begin with one single perfectly choreographed, legitimate and legal action [the gold put]... the remainder of the heavy lifting will now be shared amongst the increasing number of major countries when it finally dawns on them that they have a viable and functional escape from the old hegemonic 'order'. They will exit the petrodollar, and US treasuries in absolute droves as they flock to a new construct that they are confident will not be weaponised.
So what are these different levels and tools that we can all as a team deploy in order to disenfranchise the Frankenstein-like creature? That's the one that crawled out of Jekyll Island, spawned of course by the old Anglo European family dynasties that masterminded and then cultivated this entire construct for over one hundred years...
- LEVEL ONE Direct barter of crops, goods and services. Local currencies created... there are some 200 successful models in France alone. Use of cash as much as possible. Careful use of crypto-currencies that are not Govt centralised or controlled.
- LEVEL TWO Development of Coop structured banks that are small and regional. They would have very local and pro-active oversight and support and advice, with effective moral hazard based safeguards that avoid delinquencies. These are not debt-based and the loans are made using the backing of the local public assets or, for instance in Maori group ownership, the assets that are on the balance sheet of their financial entity. There is no third party or shareholders raking off profits. The Bank is the members themselves... they gain all the rewards. Loans can be made at affordable rates and wealthy locals can support their area by opening up interest-bearing deposit accounts. This is a complete departure from a rentier style [aka neofeudalistic] model into one that invests capital in creating goods and services and not in blowing asset bubbles. This model is proven to provide negligible inflation. There is actually a good incentive for the wealthy to have these savings accounts from an interest point of view, as well as to provide the comforting feeling that they are in effect investing in their local region as well as their families and future generations.
- LEVEL THREE Large cooperative development banks. Once again loans and money backed by tangible assets and not created out of thin air as debt. These can provide then funding for large infrastructural projects. These projects would all be completed at around half the total cost of these projects with the traditional funding sources. The backing for
- making these effectively zero interest loans would be state-owned assets. Think of places like North Dakota or China for active working models, some of which have been successful for more than a century.
Yes! The primary objection to my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, has been "how is this going to come about?" And now we have the empire dismantling itself at freefall speed, bringing with it a world of hurt for those 12% in NATOstan with no one to blame but their rulers. So it leaves us in the foreseeable future in a position to only bring good out of the wreckage, if we have a plan.
If you are not yet married to your plan, I really hope you will date mine. We agree totally in the definition of the problem, which is huge. I write about Jeckyll Island and the shenanigans that got the Federal Reserve Act passed on Christmas Eve eve, with almost no one in Congress and its greatest opponent, William Jennings Bryan, praising it because it was worded so obscurely. I talk about the third-party candidate trick that got Taft elected, who they knew would sign it. These things alone should make it rescindable, in a court concerned with justice--for which I wouldn't hold my breath.
What you describe in Phase One are fine things to do, and things I've been involved with for a couple of decades. But, as I talk about in my last YT (still writing the text for Substack version), they don't change the system. My plan, which I'll describe for the US, capitalizes community-owned public banks with the Social Security Trust Fund, gives it and long-term savings a high rate of interest--possible because banks can issue 10X their capital, rescinds the right of private banks to loan money they don't have, pushes a community credit that I call carets into monthly targeted subsidies for locally produced food, wellcare, education & home improvements (thereby stimulating the local economy), and makes locally spent carets free of taxes except for SS but uses a 2:1 exchange rate for dollars to carets and taxes carets to dollars at 50%. So community residents have double the advantage in buying housing (over hedge funds) and in competing with foreign-made products.
We both know the dollar is tanking. Sun Tzu is right, leave it alone. But in the immortal words of the Godfather, leave the money, take the assets (it was something like that, yeah?) My plan uses eminent domain to buy them back and get extractive industries turned into local co-ops. And yes, I write extensively about N Dakota (from my contributions to a collaborative text on public banking) and also some about China. We're on the same page, but I think this can be done in a decentralized way that would protect it from being wrapped up in a big red bow and carried off by the next troika (a term Greece used for the European Commission, IMF & European Central Bank).
Hi Tereza... I Love your comment and your great question.
JUST TO PREFACE... I am enormously impressed with Mathew
Ehret's work... only relatively recently becoming aware of the full extent of it, and how he can collate so many, seemingly at times, almost random unrelated global events. Mathew has this unique gift where he can pluck them out of the swirling mists and arrange them into something tangible, cohesive, and utterly understandable for the masses.
His moulding of vitally important historical events, with modern geopolitics, is IMO exemplary. For his age or any age for that matter, it is just flat out astonishing. His ability to illustrate the abject tragedies that have happened along the way... which by the way are sometimes long forgotten by so many of us [case in point Alfred Herrhausen]. These instances spotlight missed opportunities and how on so many occasions the world could well have been utterly transformed into a completely new thriving reality... a place that had the cooperative good of the masses as the priority, whilst the wants of the obscene kleptocrats could have been banished into almost complete irrelevance.
I am also a huge fan of Michael Hudson, Pepe Escobar, and also Fabio Vighi's analysis too. [Fabio is a Prof of Critical thinking at Cardiff Uni.] With Mathew rounding out the foursome, this is an absolutely fabulous treasure trove of wisdom and intellect.
And now my 2 cents worth from NZ, and an attempt to answer to Tereza's question... and quite frankly if someone doesn't answer it satisfactorily, and very soon, then humanity is all but lost... at least in any sustainable form.
I am trying desperately to keep my cup at the very least half full. In order to do that I have to accept the enormity of the tragedy that has already occurred and also what is yet to unfold. However, the truly uplifting thing for me is to endeavour to come up with a coherent plan and a chart with waypoints to follow on a journey towards a defined endpoint. This is empowerment and inspiration for myself and hopefully for many others. It is as much an intellectual journey as anything else and a realisation we are duty-bound to make our own individual contributions.
Perhaps singer, songwriter, and extraordinary wordsmith, Leonard Cohen said it best with these words in his signature song 'Anthem'...
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
I like to think that at any stage in the future I will be able to outline my contribution and to hold my head high because I did at least try to come up with solutions and not just resort to endlessly parroting the problems of the day.
When my beautiful grand-daughters ask me the question... what did you do Poppa?... I want to be able to answer them with genuine pride. So too, I don't even want to contemplate them enduring a future that is a modern-day techno-version of a commy gulag.
I visualise the situation very simplistically and accept the fact that humanity has been subject to ever ratcheted up financial terrorism, and that this must be addressed at the very highest level... otherwise, we are really only rearranging deck chairs.
I try to compartmentalise the individual problems. Trying to absorb the entire mess in one sitting is a giant step too far. My strategy is to look at each problem individually and to try to brainstorm a solution for each individual challenge before moving on to the next.
If you bring in enough resources to the table all of these problems are solvable. The vital thing is to collate these solutions so that they appear as individual jigsaw pieces that can then be assembled to reveal the full picture. The wonderful thing is the outcome is not necessarily the proverbial train-wreck... what I envisage is actually precisely the opposite.
So here I am genuinely excited and uplifted in regard to the developments in the last month in terms of new global financial and trading instruments emerging that are already replacing the broken and utterly corrupt status quo.
The single guarantee in this completely uncharted territory will be the immensely destructive global economic fallout. However, emerging out of the financial carnage, I visualise an exciting new economic renaissance. This will be the eventual reward to at least partially compensate for the excruciating birthing process. Mr Global's financial construct was never ever going to exit quietly off-stage and simply slide away into the night. The biggest unknown is to just what extent these craven lunatics will resort to the Samson option.
So much is happening at so many levels, but arguably the most telling statistic of all is about 'Natostan'... as Pepe Escobar refers to the group, which is in essence really just Financial Zone A. They have just succeeded admirably in isolating Russia from somewhere around a paltry 12% of the world population. Of course they didn't "just isolate" them... they were already completely hysterical Russia/Sinophobes. This latest complete Dunkirk lookalike follow on on from very recent debacles in Iran, Afghanistan and Kazakstan is the game-changer, and it has happened at truly breathtaking pace.
Spin this boomerang another way... Financial Zone A has pretty much burnt most of its bridges already, with a truly staggering 88% of the world population deserting for vastly greener pastures. I am ashamed to say that, NZ, just like Australia [although neither country is a NATO member] however, both countries are fully supportive of this completely idiotic death-cult-like behaviour. We are akin to pathetic chihuahua lapdogs barking from behind the heals of what was once a monolithic hegemon.
contin...
Colin, I'm honored that you chose my comment to write your magnum opus in response to ;-) I'm going to savor it and respond to each (in the order written) before reading the others, because you've put in so many juicy and tantalizing places to jump off!
First, what a BEAUTIFUL testimony to Matthew's work! Your praise is so perceptive in looking at the way he discerns the patterns. And I share your enthusiasm for Michael Hudson, my favorite economist, Pepe Escobar, and Leonard Cohen, perhaps my favorite songwriter. If there are links to Fabio Vighi's work, please share them.
And I love that Matthew focuses on times when things could have gone another way, which I didn't recognize until you pointed it out. I had first considered calling my book Missed Pivots, because I look at the same thing. I think it's important to recognize how many near-misses there have been, and what deflected them. I go back 3500 yrs to the origins of democracy, that thwarted an anarchy of slaves, colonized and landless in exchange for hierarchy (the inheritance order of the archons). I look at Ben Franklin's colonial economic system that made poverty obsolete, and how it was thwarted by the British Currency Act. And then I look at Shay's Rebellion and how one intercepted message defeated it, leading to a Constitution written by merchants and bankers. The Populist Rebellion and free silver was another close call for capitalism.
Yes, I absolutely agree that the goal is "a coherent plan and a chart with waypoints to follow on a journey towards a defined endpoint." That's what my book is, and I'm dying for someone to take it seriously or tell me why they have a more foolproof plan ;-)
And I'm totally with you that my 12% of the world's population being suddenly left to our own devices is scary and exhilarating as hell! Your chihuahua metaphor is apt.
All good Tereza... I will be following your work with huge interest. I will put an order in for all your books today and read up ASAP... I am gobsmacked that I have missed them! Clearly there will be many things that you have picked up on that I am not aware of yet.
I have tried to get a really productive think-tank going down here in NZ and although we have lots of ideas at the local level we really struggle with finding knowledgeable people to brainstorm on possible solutions and models at the macro and central bank level. I don't even bother with any of our local academics... clearly their narratives have been captured by Mr Global anyway.
I am not fixed in my theories in any way and find myself still learning every day... I find new ideas tremendously exciting and see myself as a banking model nurd as well as a self confessed information sponge.
I am also working with a group on Governance models that are immune from financial lobby and which can actually become functional democracies that fit beautifully with the coop/state banking models.
The model that I have the most faith in is based on direct recall where our representatives in parliament answer directly to their local constituents and can be removed at any stage of their term. Party manifestos basically are non existent and any green type ideas for example come from local concerns on the environment, not from any global green lobby that has been infiltrated by sinister global agendas.
If you want to zoom or Whatsap some time just let me know... I left my email address in one of the other messages. It will great to be able to bounce ideas around together.
...and my favourite essay by Vighi...
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/
Cheers and regards
Col
You're in luck Colin that I only have one book out ;-) I did get the Substack version out today of What Is the Greater Reset? And, inspired by your points, I elaborated on my plan quite a bit at the end. So I'd recommend that and the previous, Build a New Model, for the universal principles of a community-based economy, that would apply equally in NZ. I look forward to chatting more!
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/build-a-new-model
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/what-is-the-greater-reset
My apologies for the fact that the comments have ended up in reverse order from intended flow.
Cheer
Col
Quick note to both Colin and Tereza: I just wanted to state that I am really impressed to read through the high quality discussion you guys put forth and feel honored that my article provoked the fruitful exchange. It's very much a keeper.
Dear Matthew:
I read your latest Substack article that features the BRI projects, the current status of CPEC, and the current work of Minister Sergei Glazyev. This meshes well with your Lee Rockwell appearance this weekend and your lecture on the span from St. Augustine to Thomas More.
You used the terms “parasite” and “host” to describe the Babylonian-Venetians and the places where they decamped.
I note that Prof. Michael Hudson, a scholar of debt relations going back to Sumer, wrote books entitled “Killing the Host” and “And Forgive Them Their Debts”, which addressed debt history and the centrality of debt forgiveness to Judaism (before Hillel) and Christianity. See Leviticus 25:10, Isaiah 61:1-4, and Luke Chapter 4 (Jesus’ first sermon in a synagogue).
I make the case again to pursue synergistic discussion with Michael Hudson. He considers Minister Glazyev as an ally in Modern Monetary Theory. I dare say that Minister Glazyev has applied “Superimperialism” and “Global Fracture” in real time.
Thank you very much again for the work you are doing to induce me to know myself, learn how I think, focus on Ideas and Spirit, and improve myself in humanity.
Peter
Dear Peter. Feel free to send Hudson an email suggesting my work and saying hi. Let me know what he replies
Wilco, Matthew.
Will the Taliban's continuing slaughter of Afghan Tajiks hold up the rail line?
The article takes my thoughts back to Greece, when the country changed to the euro and was plunged into debt, Greece had many assets, therefore how could they be enslaved into a system which instantaneously destroyed their economy. Greece relied on tourism as part of their economy therefore their own monetary system became stronger in the summer months and weakened during the winter which balanced the economy. Around 1990, the E.U. brought out a directive which stated car manufacturers had to pay compensation to franchise companies if the manufacturers decided to terminate a franchise company, which would become law within two years, what happened, most all of the car manufacturers terminated hundreds of small and medium sized franchises before the directive became law. Is the Public Sector destroying the Private Sector ? The public sector at one time was there to look after the public services and the private sector was there to build the profits making tax to sustain the public sector. Some public sector salaries have increased well beyond the cost of living, while profits and salaries have become unsustainable in many private companies. Have governments in the West aligned themselves more with the E.U. building their own private sector while stripping the assets of the Western countries ? Are some Charity Foundations giving extraordinary amounts of money to many sectors to push an agenda which will have catastrophic consequences to the balance of the economy and life itself ? Due to E.U. rules and regulations many farmers rely on subsidies, what if those subsidies were held back, would the farmers lose their farms, only to be bought up by those who held back the payments ? Are we in a situation where the system is being damaged from within, should the Justice System be applying the rule of law by protecting our Fundamental Laws and Constitutional Rights ? The fiat currency has been abused, the NWO total reset is not the answer, as that amounts to enslavement, the future can be much brighter for all, once the damage has been dismantled.