Pirates There Be

Landlubbers,

  Extraction and concentration of the wealth and power of the world into a few hands is the name-of-some-people's-game. It requires a productive economy of people and industry, and natural resources to feed that economy, or there is no "wealth". Meshing all of the parts of such a complex economy requires a secure financial system, but it is hard to create a secure and efficient financial system, because it is such a tempting spot to steal a little bit, then a little bit more.

  In the physical world be pirates. There used to be vast fleets of pirates, estimated at 40,000 pirates in one large Chinese pirate fleet. Paying to keep the piracy at bay is a cost that must be paid for any economic system. 

  Keeping honest books, and paying for it, and keeping piracy at bay, by keeping honest armies, navies and police are large, serious and ongoing expenses. Those systems to enforce order and are prizes to steal from the inside, which corrupts the system, while rewarding the new thieves and pirates. The system declines until it fails, or is replaced by a better, less corrupt system.

  In the postwar Bretton-Woods system the US had a large manufacturing base, most of the world's oil, and the majority of the world's gold, and the atomic-bomb. The US was being an unusually decent victor. There was little choice but to trust the US to lead the financial side and the enforcement side of that "new world order", replacing the decaying British Empire.

  Our lives have seen the corruption of that system in the financial side and in the piracy/military-enforcement side. The US lost gold and oil along the way, too. The "US" is not "really the US" now, due to parasitic players in the vast global financial regime, and in the CIA/NSA/Mossad/MI-5/MI-6/Pentagon/NATO, etc grouping. The humans who actually wield power through the bureaucratic halls-of-power are unseen, their best protection. They are often in power struggles with each other. The appearance is that they are all able to do a lot more harm than good. this is creating a downward spiral of the economic systems which support our lives.

  It seems that there is little hope for enough reform in the Bretton-Woods/NATO system, since it is so corrupted in every part, by competing corrupt interests. How could a quorum of honest people, in all of the critical arms of finance, government, military and covert-agencies be achieved to rid the vast system of pervasive corruption?

  The US went through the Revolutionary War, Civil War and Depression/WW-2 as crucibles. The Russians had a hell of a 20th century, but came out of it around Y2k. The Chinese had an equally exhausting and bloody 20th century, mostly turning around after their Cultural Revolution, the deal with Nixon-Kissinger, and the rise of Deng Xiaopeng.

  The Bretton-Woods alternative system was there for each of those regime collapses, and the Chinese got the better deal, since the Soviet-Threat was still there, and gave China a better bargaining position with the west.

  With Bretton-Woods on it's last legs, to my analysis, I have to ask about the alternative system, which may be adopted, as the collective-west flounders in the most vast and globally pervasive economic system ever.

  The Wolfowitz Doctrine, upon which the US has relied for 30 years, is to murder any such nascent "threat" to US/NATO hegemony in the cradle. 

Hence, there ain't one. Yet...

  The Chinese and Russians, and to various degrees the other BRICS countries, and Iran, with lots of interest from TROTW (the rest of the world), have been figuring something out since at least 2008, when it became clear that the western Bretton-Woods system was going to die, which it is spiraling into, now. They don't have it working yet. It's really complicated, and how many of the players are "honest" or "honest enough"? 

  How do they deal with countries like Argentina, which is a productive enough country, but keeps defaulting on debt? Argentina is naturally interested in joining a new system and forgetting all the $US debt forever. These are times of deep suspicion, not trust, so any system has to have very short leashes for every country, either matching exports to imports, or transferring gold for the balance. 

  The Wolfowitz Doctrine is the sort of doctrine which would lead to the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines as a threat to the current system. It is a doctrine that does not consider human suffering as a cost. Human suffering and death are an "externality" to the analysis of the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Which particular team or teams within NATOstan did the deed? Can we know? The German secret service reportedly got blind-sided. The Pentagon spokespeople say they didn't know, and they're probably convinced that nobody in the Pentagon knew...

  We can't really know all of the secret-pathways into the military world of covert-operations, and cover-stories, but we can put some of it together, which the links today do.

I remain hopeful that the nascent global trade order, the "Multipolar World", supporting trade between sovereign nations, and respecting national sovereignty, will be able to get moving.

The new system will need to be able to deliver. 

  300,000 tons of free Russian fertilizer in European ports can't get to Africa. 95% or more of the Ukrainian grain to prevent world famine is likewise remaining in Europe, apparently owned by Monsanto and friends, or as payment for all those weapons Ukraine has been getting from the US, but with the payment guarantied by Europe.

  We see that Russia having oil, gas, pipelines and tankers is not enough when covert attacks can prevent delivery. Italy is having trouble getting Russian gas through Austria for some reason, even though the pipelines are intact.

  This battle between the declining global economic regime, and one that is trying to stand and walk looks like it will drag on for a long time. If it ends quickly, it means the infant got killed, which almost certainly means a really long, drawn out bad period for the rest of my own life.

  In bad times, it helps to grow some food in a garden patch. That has been proven repeatedly by history. It helps to live in a smaller, but not-too-small community, with local industry, and low-overhead. Weather that won't usually kill you is a big plus.

  Pepe Escobar looks at the work of Straussian followers of "The Wolfowitz Doctrine": Who profits from Pipeline Terror?   Secret talks between Russia and Germany to resolve their Nord Stream 1 and 2 issues had to be averted at any cost ​The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or German intelligence) was “furious” because “they were not in the loop.”
Of course not. If the hypothesis is correct, this was a glaringly anti-German operation, carrying the potential of metastasizing into an intra-NATO war.
​  ​The much-quoted NATO Article 5 – ‘an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us’ – obviously does not say anything about a NATO-on-NATO attack. After the pipeline punctures, NATO issued a meek statement “believing” what happened was sabotage and will “respond” to any deliberate attack on its critical infrastructure. NS and NS2, incidentally, are not part of NATO’s infrastructure.
​  ​The whole operation had to be approved by Americans, and deployed under their Divide and Rule trademark. “Americans” in this case means the Neo-conservatives and Neo-liberals running the government machinery in Washington, behind the senile teleprompter reader.
​  ​This is a declaration of war against Germany and against businesses and citizens of the EU – not against the Kafkaesque Eurocrat machine in Brussels. https://thecradle.co/Article/Columns/16307

  Michael Hudson looks at "The Euro Without Germany", or without German industrial exports supporting the currency.  Germany’s willingness to self-impose an economic depression was wavering – although not its politicians or the EU bureaucracy. If German policymakers were to put German business interests and living standards first, NATO’s common sanctions and New Cold War front would be broken. Italy and France might follow suit. That nightmare of European diplomatic independence made it urgent to take the anti-Russian sanctions out of the hands of democratic politics and settle matters by sabotaging the two pipelines. Despite being an act of violence, it has restored calm to international diplomatic relations between U.S. and German politicians.
​  ​There is no more uncertainty about whether or not Europe will break away from U.S. New Cold War aims by restoring mutual trade and investment with Russia. That option is now out. The threat of Europe b​r​eaking away from the US/NATO trade and financial sanctions against Russia has been solved, seemingly for the foreseeable future, as Russia has announced that as the gas pressure falls in three of the four pipelines, the infusion of salt water will irreversibly corrode the pipes.​....The “sanctions debate” has been solved by a German and indeed Europe-wide economic crash. To Europe, the next decade will be a disaster. There may be recriminations against the price paid for letting its trade diplomacy be dictated by NATO, but there is nothing that it can do about it. Nobody (yet) expects it to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. What is expected is for its living standards to plunge... ..Many European and Global South countries already have reached the limit of their ability to service their dollar-denominated debts, and are still coping with the Covid pandemic. They cannot afford to import the energy and food that they need to live if they have to pay their foreign debts. The world economy is now exceeding its debt limits, so something has to give.. ..I have no doubt that U.S. strategists have a game plan for how to proceed from here, and to do so that indeed is in what the neocons claim to be in the U.S. interest – that of maintaining a unipolar neoliberalized and financialized global economy for as long as they can.
  They have long had a plan for countries that are unable to their foreign debts. The IMF will lend them the money, conditional upon the debtor country raising the foreign exchange to repay the (increasingly expensive) dollar loans by privatizing what remains of their public domain, natural-resource patrimony and other assets, mainly to U.S. financial investors and their allies.
  Will it work? Or will debtor countries band together and work out ways to restore the seemingly lost world of affordable oil and gas prices, fertilizer prices, grain and other food prices, and metals or raw materials supplied by Russia, China and their allied Eurasian neighbors?
  That is the next great worry for U.S. global strategists. It seems less easy to solve than was done by the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2. But the solution seems to be the usual U.S. approach: something military in nature...
..Unless an institutional alternative is created to the IMF, World Bank, International Court, World Trade Organization and the numerous UN agencies now biased by U.S. diplomats and their proxies, the coming decades will see the U.S. economic strategy of financial and military dominance unfold as Washington has planned.   https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/09/michael-hudson-on-the-euro-without-germany.html

John Helmer October Surprise : Ask not what the Kremlin will do, but what the US will do next. ​ (Feirly detailed, but here's the closing summation)  ..​The count reveals that US voters do not want to risk the direction of their country if the Biden Administration and the Kremlin open war on US territory. A false-flag operation, to be approved in secret by the National Security Council, for sabotage of US gas pipelines, power grids, or nuclear reactors, portrayed to voters as a Russian retaliatory strike, would run a bigger risk than any October Surprise in American election history.​  ​http://johnhelmer.net/the-october-surprise-ask-not-what-the-kremlin-will-do-but-what-the-us-will-do-next/

​  This particular risk arises in a "unipolar world" or a "multipolar world", whenever there is enough digital infrastructure to enforce a CBDC (central bank digital currency)   ​  A​doption of CBDC in a cashless society, where no other form of payment is “permitted,” enslaves every citizen to the state. CBDC is both programmable money and a liability of the central banks. Not only does it always belong to the central bank, and never the user, it can be programmed to function as they see fit.​  ​https://off-guardian.org/2022/09/27/multipolar-world-order-part-2/

​Paul Joseph Watson  ​
“No Evidence” US Involved in Nord Stream Pipeline Attack Because Pentagon Says So​   ​https://summit.news/2022/09/29/no-evidence-us-involved-in-nord-stream-pipeline-attack-because-pentagon-says-so/

Jessica Rose Ph.D. looks at the genetic structure of the original SARS-CoV2 virus, bringing up something a lot of us were interested in, in early 2020, the copied functional sections of the AIDS virus, and also the Furin-cleavage-site, neither of which occurred before in any coronavirus, and which have specific weaponized functions. Jessica goes back to the original scientific paper, retracted by the authors without explanation, and adds more recent findings and explanation. It has been clear to me, as it was to Luc Montagnier MD, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering HIV, the AIDS virus, that this came from a lab.​       ​https://jessicar.substack.com/p/it-turns-out-that-the-prrarsv-motif

Penniless Vegetable Gardener (picture of wife, Jenny with pear-blossom this morning)