Is the proxy war in Ukraine turning out to be only a lead-up to something larger, involving world famine and a foreign-exchange crisis for food- and oil-deficit countries?
Many more people are likely to die of famine and economic disruption than on the Ukrainian battlefield. It thus is appropriate to ask whether what appeared to be the Ukraine proxy war is part of a larger strategy to lock in U.S. control over international trade and payments. We are seeing a financially weaponized power grab by the U.S. Dollar Area over the Global South as well as over Western Europe. Without dollar credit from the United States and its IMF subsidiary, how can countries stay afloat? How hard will the U.S. act to block them from de-dollarizing, opting out of the U.S. economic orbit?
U.S. Cold War strategy is not alone in thinking how to benefit from provoking a famine, oil and balance-of-payments crisis. Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum worries that the world is overpopulated – at least with the "wrong kind" of people. As Microsoft philanthropist (the customary euphemism for rentier monopolist) Bill Gates has explained: "Population growth in Africa is a challenge." His lobbying foundation's 2018 "Goalkeepers" report warned: "According to U.N. data, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world's population growth between 2015 and 2050. Its population is projected to double by 2050," with "more than 40 percent of world's extremely poor people … in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria."
Gates advocates cutting this projected population increase by 30 percent by improving access to birth control and expanding education to "enable more girls and women to stay in school longer, have children later." But how can that be afforded with this summer’s looming food and oil squeeze on government budgets?
South Americans and some Asian countries are subject to the same jump in import prices resulting from NATO's demands to isolate Russia. JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon recently warned attendees at a Wall Street investor conference that the sanctions will cause a global "economic hurricane." He echoed the warning by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva in April that, "To put it simply: we are facing a crisis on top of a crisis." Pointing out that the Covid pandemic has been capped by inflation as the war in Ukraine has made matters "much worse, and threatens to further increase inequality" she concluded that: "The economic consequences from the war spread fast and far, to neighbors and beyond, hitting hardest the world's most vulnerable people. Hundreds of millions of families were already struggling with lower incomes and higher energy and food prices."
The Biden administration blames Russia for "unprovoked aggression." But it is his administration's pressure on NATO and other Dollar Area satellites that has blocked Russian exports of grain, oil and gas. But many oil- and food-deficit countries see themselves as the primary victims of "collateral damage" caused by US/NATO pressure.
Is world famine and balance-of-payments crisis a deliberate US/NATO policy?
On June 3, African Union Chairperson Macky Sall, President of Senegal, went to Moscow to plan how to avoid a disruption in Africa's food and oil trade by refusing to become pawns in the US/NATO sanctions. So far in 2022, President Putin noted: "Our trade is growing. In the first months of this year it grew by 34 percent." But Senegal's President Sall worried that: "Anti-Russia sanctions have made this situation worse and now we do not have access to grain from Russia, primarily to wheat. And, most importantly, we do not have access to fertilizer."
U.S. diplomats are forcing countries to choose whether, in George W. Bush's words, "you are either for us or against us." The litmus test is whether they are willing to force their populations to starve and shut down their economies for lack of food and oil by stopping trade with the world's Eurasian core of China, Russia, India, Iran and their neighbors.
Mainstream Western media describe the logic behind these sanctions as promoting a regime change in Russia. The hope was that blocking it from selling its oil and gas, food or other exports would drive down the ruble’s exchange rate and "make Russia scream" (as the U.S. tried to do to Allende's Chile to set the stage for its backing of the Pinochet military coup). Exclusion from the SWIFT bank-clearing system was supposed to disrupt Russia's payment system and sales, while seizing Russia's $300 billion of foreign-currency reserves held in the West was expected to collapse the ruble, preventing Russian consumers from buying the Western goods to which they had become accustomed. The idea (and it seems so silly in retrospect) was that Russia's population would rise in rebellion to protest against how much more Western luxury imports cost. But the ruble soared rather than sunk, and Russia quickly replaced SWIFT with its own system linked to that of China. And Russia's population began to turn away from the West's aggressive enmity.
Evidently some major dimensions are missing from the U.S. national-security think-tank models. But when it comes to global famine, was a more covert and even larger strategy at work? It is now looking like the major aim of the U.S. war in Ukraine all along was merely to serve as a catalyst, an excuse to impose sanctions that would disrupt the world's food and energy trade. Additionally to manage this crisis in a way that would afford U.S. diplomats an opportunity to confront Global South countries with the choice "Your loyalty and neoliberal dependency or your life?" In the process, this would "thin out" the world's non-white populations that so worried Mr. Dimon and the WEF.
There must have been the following calculation: Russia accounts for 40% of the world's grain trade and 25 percent of the world fertilizer market (45 percent if Belarus is included). Any scenario would have included a calculation that if so large a volume of grain and fertilizer was withdrawn from the market, prices would soar, just as they have done for oil and gas.
Adding to the disruption in the balance-of-payments of countries having to import these commodities, the price is rising for buying dollars to pay their foreign bondholders and banks for debts falling due. The Federal Reserve's tightening of interest rates has caused a rising premium for U.S. dollars over euros, sterling and Global South currencies.
Please go to Michael Hudson's website to read more.
Pakistan hikes fuel prices to meet IMF loan conditions
Pakistan's Forex Reserves Dip Below $10 Billion as IMF Loan Uncertain
Imran Khan ultimatum looms as Pakistan pushes for IMF deal
IMF Seizes on Pandemic to Pave Way for Privatization in 81 Countries
South Americans and some Asian countries are subject to the same jump in import prices resulting from NATO's demands to isolate Russia. JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon recently warned attendees at a Wall Street investor conference that the sanctions will cause a global "economic hurricane." He echoed the warning by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva in April that, "To put it simply: we are facing a crisis on top of a crisis." Pointing out that the Covid pandemic has been capped by inflation as the war in Ukraine has made matters "much worse, and threatens to further increase inequality" she concluded that: "The economic consequences from the war spread fast and far, to neighbors and beyond, hitting hardest the world's most vulnerable people. Hundreds of millions of families were already struggling with lower incomes and higher energy and food prices."
The Biden administration blames Russia for "unprovoked aggression." But it is his administration's pressure on NATO and other Dollar Area satellites that has blocked Russian exports of grain, oil and gas. But many oil- and food-deficit countries see themselves as the primary victims of "collateral damage" caused by US/NATO pressure.
Is world famine and balance-of-payments crisis a deliberate US/NATO policy?
On June 3, African Union Chairperson Macky Sall, President of Senegal, went to Moscow to plan how to avoid a disruption in Africa's food and oil trade by refusing to become pawns in the US/NATO sanctions. So far in 2022, President Putin noted: "Our trade is growing. In the first months of this year it grew by 34 percent." But Senegal's President Sall worried that: "Anti-Russia sanctions have made this situation worse and now we do not have access to grain from Russia, primarily to wheat. And, most importantly, we do not have access to fertilizer."
U.S. diplomats are forcing countries to choose whether, in George W. Bush's words, "you are either for us or against us." The litmus test is whether they are willing to force their populations to starve and shut down their economies for lack of food and oil by stopping trade with the world's Eurasian core of China, Russia, India, Iran and their neighbors.
Mainstream Western media describe the logic behind these sanctions as promoting a regime change in Russia. The hope was that blocking it from selling its oil and gas, food or other exports would drive down the ruble’s exchange rate and "make Russia scream" (as the U.S. tried to do to Allende's Chile to set the stage for its backing of the Pinochet military coup). Exclusion from the SWIFT bank-clearing system was supposed to disrupt Russia's payment system and sales, while seizing Russia's $300 billion of foreign-currency reserves held in the West was expected to collapse the ruble, preventing Russian consumers from buying the Western goods to which they had become accustomed. The idea (and it seems so silly in retrospect) was that Russia's population would rise in rebellion to protest against how much more Western luxury imports cost. But the ruble soared rather than sunk, and Russia quickly replaced SWIFT with its own system linked to that of China. And Russia's population began to turn away from the West's aggressive enmity.
Evidently some major dimensions are missing from the U.S. national-security think-tank models. But when it comes to global famine, was a more covert and even larger strategy at work? It is now looking like the major aim of the U.S. war in Ukraine all along was merely to serve as a catalyst, an excuse to impose sanctions that would disrupt the world's food and energy trade. Additionally to manage this crisis in a way that would afford U.S. diplomats an opportunity to confront Global South countries with the choice "Your loyalty and neoliberal dependency or your life?" In the process, this would "thin out" the world's non-white populations that so worried Mr. Dimon and the WEF.
There must have been the following calculation: Russia accounts for 40% of the world's grain trade and 25 percent of the world fertilizer market (45 percent if Belarus is included). Any scenario would have included a calculation that if so large a volume of grain and fertilizer was withdrawn from the market, prices would soar, just as they have done for oil and gas.
Adding to the disruption in the balance-of-payments of countries having to import these commodities, the price is rising for buying dollars to pay their foreign bondholders and banks for debts falling due. The Federal Reserve's tightening of interest rates has caused a rising premium for U.S. dollars over euros, sterling and Global South currencies.
Please go to Michael Hudson's website to read more.
________
Here is an example of what Michael Hudson in his article above referred to "seeing a financially weaponized power grab by the U.S. Dollar Area over the Global South as well as over Western Europe."
Here is an example of what Michael Hudson in his article above referred to "seeing a financially weaponized power grab by the U.S. Dollar Area over the Global South as well as over Western Europe."
Pakistan and the IMF. People always locked into debt slavery:
Pakistan hikes fuel prices to meet IMF loan conditions
Pakistan's Forex Reserves Dip Below $10 Billion as IMF Loan Uncertain
Doesn't matter who you are or if you are a leader of a country. If you go against the IMF and don't bow down to them your chances of getting assassinated significantly increase. Pakistan is caught in a balance of payments trap with the IMF.
Remember IMF whistleblower John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man? In its simplest form: "In this hand I have a lot of money for you and your friends. If you choose not to take it I have a gun." Our suggestion to Pakistan's Imran Khan is to not fly in an aircraft.
IMF seizes the initiative under the global Covid fake pandemic. It is no coincidence that the Pentagon uses the IMF and the World Bank as "unconventional weapons." Wherever the US dollar goes the US military soon follows.
Note to readers: Google censors this blog. Google also manipulates elections: WATCH: How Google Swings Elections
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.