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Hier — 28 mars 2024Analyses, perspectives

Point de vue sur l’attaque terroriste au Crocus City hall de Krasnorgorsk

Il est hasardeux de prétendre commenter un évènement de guerre clandestine surtout « à chaud ». La petite expérience de l’auteur lui

L’article Point de vue sur l’attaque terroriste au Crocus City hall de Krasnorgorsk est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

À partir d’avant-hierAnalyses, perspectives

Et maintenant, où va le projet Israël-Gaza ?

par Philip Giraldi. Cet étrange petit bonhomme de Jared Kushner est de nouveau engagé dans des réunions secrètes, mais cette fois, il est promu par certains comme candidat possible à la vice-présidence.

Comment le Crédit Agricole fait des bénéfices colossaux sur votre dos…

Dans le capitalisme de connivence qui nous domine, les banques tiennent un rôle de choix : puissantes, elles ont la faculté d’obtenir des réglementations favorables et protectionnistes pour leurs intérêts, comme elles ont la faculté de bloquer des réformes qui pourraient leur nuire. L’affaire de l’assurance emprunteur illustre parfaitement ce type d’arrangements loin des regards. Une banque comme le Crédit Agricole a pu dégager des dizaines de milliards de bénéfices depuis des années grâce à ce dispositif pas complètement d’équerre avec les règles de la concurrence. Mais elle n’est pas la seule : quelques banques en ont bien profité.

L’assurance emprunteur est une assurance-vie que vous êtes obligé de souscrire lorsque vous contractez un emprunt.

  • très longtemps, les banques ont pu obliger les clients à souscrire au contrat d’assurance emprunteur qu’elles proposaient en même temps que le crédit
  • les politiques de défiscalisation dans l’immobilier ont permis aux banques de “caser” de nombreux contrats d’assurance emprunteur dans des conditions non-concurrentielles, et parfois opaques (sur ce point, voire notre article “patrimoine” du jour, sur l’intérêt ou non d’acheter de l’immobilier défiscalisé pour préparer sa retraite et la vidéo ci-dessous)
  • ce marché est très cartellisé
  • encore aujourd’hui, faute d’une concurrence suffisante, les banques peuvent placer ces contrats qui sont surfacturés
  • un rapport de l’IGF de 2013 affirme que la surfacturation des contrats était d’environ 50%
  • des évolutions législatives ont permis une mise en concurrence, mais leur effet reste encore limité

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Pourquoi l’Occident ne peut pas supporter les Russes

par Andre Vltchek. De grandes cultures comme la Russie et la Chine n'ont pas besoin que les Occidentaux leur disent ce qu'est la liberté et ce qu'est la démocratie, et ne veulent pas qu'ils le fassent.

Why the West cannot stomach Russians

Par : AHH

In the west, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.

By Andre Vltchek via The Greanville Post.

When it comes to Russia or the Soviet Union, reports and historical accounts do get blurry; in the West they do, and consequently in all of its ‘client states’. Fairytales get intermingled with reality, while fabrications are masterfully injected into the sub consciousness of billions of people worldwide. Russia is an enormous country, in fact the largest country on Earth in terms of territory. It is scarcely inhabited. It is deep, and as a classic writer once wrote: “It is impossible to understand Russia with one’s brain. One could only believe in it.”

The Western mind generally doesn’t like things unknown, spiritual and complex. Since the ‘old days’, especially since the crusades and monstrous colonialist expeditions to all corners of the world, the Westerners were told fables about their own “noble deeds” performed in the plundered lands. Everything had to be clear and simple: “Virtuous Europeans were civilizing savages and spreading Christianity, therefore, in fact, saving those dark poor primitive souls.”

Of course, tens of millions were dying in the process, while further tens of millions were shackled and brought to the “New Worlds” as slaves. Gold, silver, and other loot, as well as slave labor had been (and still are) paying for all those European palaces, railroads, universities and theatres, but that did not matter, as the bloodshed was most of the time something abstract and far away from those over-sensitive eyes of the Western public.

Westerners like simplicity, particularly when it comes to moral definitions of “good and evil”. It matters nothing if the truth gets systematically ‘massaged’, or even if the reality is fully fabricated. What matters is that there is no deep guilt and no soul-searching. Western rulers and their opinion makers know their people – their ‘subjects’ – perfectly well, and most of the time, they give them what they are asking for. The rulers and the reigned are generally living in symbiosis. They keep bitching about each other, but mostly they have similar goals: to live well, to live extremely well, as long as the others are forced to pay for it; with their riches, with their labor and often with their blood.

Culturally, most of the citizens of Europe and North America hate to pay the bill for their high life; they even detest to admit that their life is extremely ‘high’. They like to feel like victims. They like to feel that they are ‘used’. They like to imagine that they are sacrificing themselves for the rest of the world.

And above all, they hate real victims: those they have been murdering, raping, plundering and insulting, for decades and centuries.

Recent ‘refugee crises’ showed the spite Europeans feel for their prey. People who made them rich and who lost everything in the process are humiliated, despised and insulted. Be they Afghans or Africans, the Middle Easterners or South Asians. Or Russians, although Russians fall into their own, unique category.

Prince Alexander Nevsky’s legendary defeat of the Teutonic Knights on a frozen lake in the 13th century has always captivated and inspired the Russian people in their struggles against foreign invaders, especially from the West.

Many Russians look white. Most of them eat with knife and fork, they drink alcohol, excel at Western classical music, poetry, literature, science and philosophy.

To Western eyes they look ‘normal’, but actually, they are not.

Russians always want ‘something else’; they refuse to play by Western rules.

They are stubbornly demanding to remain different, and to be left alone.

When confronted, when attacked, they fight.

They rarely strike first, almost never invade.

But when threatened, when assaulted, they fight with tremendous determination and force, and they never lose. Villages and cities get converted into invader’s graves. Millions die while defending their Motherland, but the country survives. And it happens again and again and again, as the Western hordes have been, for centuries, assaulting and burning Russian lands, never learning the lesson and never giving up on their sinister dream of conquering and controlling that proud and determined colossus.

In the West, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.

Russo-Korean symphony

It gets much worse than that.
Russia has this terrible habit… not only it defends itself and its people, but it also fights for others, protecting colonized and pillaged nations, as well as those that are unjustly assaulted.

It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 27 million men, women and children, but it did it; courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the Soviet Union for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing, is always in direct conflict with its own principles, and therefore ‘extremely dangerous’.

The Russian people had risen; had fought and won in the 1917 Revolution; an event which terrified the West more than anything else in history, as it had attempted to create a fully egalitarian, classless and racially color-blind society. It also gave birth to Internationalism, an occurrence that I recently described in my book The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism.

Soviet Internationalism, right after the victory in WWII, helped greatly, directly and indirectly, dozens of countries on all continents, to stand up and to confront the European colonialism and the North American imperialism. The West and especially Europe never forgave the Soviet people in general and Russians in particular, for helping to liberate its slaves.

That is when the greatest wave of propaganda in human history really began to roll. From London to New York, from Paris to Toronto, an elaborate web of anti-Soviet and covertly anti-Russian hysteria was unleashed with monstrously destructive force. Tens of thousands of ‘journalists’, intelligence officers, psychologists, historians, as well as academics, were employed. Nothing Soviet, nothing Russian (except those glorified and often ‘manufactured’ Russian dissidents) was spared.

The excesses or contextual errors of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the pre-WWII era were systematically fabricated, exaggerated, and then engraved into the Western history textbooks and mass media narrative. In those tales, there was nothing about the vicious invasions and attacks coming from the West, aimed at destroying the young Bolshevik state. Naturally, there was no space for mentioning the British, French, U.S., Czech, Polish, Japanese, German and other’s monstrous cruelties.

Soviet and Russian views were hardly ever allowed to penetrate the monolithic and one-sided Western propaganda narrative.

Like obedient sheep, the Western public accepted the disinformation it was fed. Eventually, many people living in the Western colonies and ‘client states’, did the same. A great number of colonized people were taught how to blame themselves for their misery.

The most absurd but somehow logical occurrence then took place: many men, women and even children living in the USSR, succumbed to Western propaganda. Instead of trying to reform their imperfect but still greatly progressive country, they gave up, became cynical, aggressively ‘disillusioned’, corrupt and naively but staunchly pro-Western.

Gorbachev: supremely, unaccountably, criminally foolish when dealing with the most ruthless mafia the world has ever seen.

It was the first and most likely the last time in the history, Russia got defeated by the West. It happened through deceit, through shameless lies, through Western propaganda.

What followed could be easily described as genocide.

The Soviet Union was first lulled into Afghanistan, then it was mortally injured by the war there, by an arms race with the United States, and by the final stage of propaganda that was literally flowing like lava from various hostile Western state-sponsored radio stations. Of course, local ‘dissidents’ also played an important role.

Under Gorbachev, a ‘useful idiot’ of the West, things got extremely bizarre. I don’t believe that he was paid to ruin his own country, but he did almost everything to run it into the ground; precisely what Washington wanted him to do. Then, in front of the entire world, a mighty and proud Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics suddenly shook in agony, then uttered a loud cry, and collapsed; died painfully but swiftly.

A new turbo-capitalist, bandit, pro-oligarch and confusedly pro-Western Russia was born. Russia which was governed by an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin; a man loved and supported by Washington, London and other Western centers of power.

It was a totally unnatural, sick Russia – cynical and compassionless, built with someone else’s ideas – Russia of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, of the BBC, of black marketers, of oligarchs and multi-national corporations.

Is the West now daring to say that Russians are ‘interfering’ in something in Washington? Are they out of their minds?

Washington and other Western capitals did not only ‘interfere’, they openly broke the Soviet Union into pieces and then they began kicking Russia which was at that point half-alive. Is it all forgotten, or is Western public again fully ‘unaware’ of what took place during those dark days?

The West kept spitting at the impoverished and injured country, refused to honor international agreements and treaties. It offered no help. Multi-nationals were unleashed, and began ‘privatizing’ Russian state companies, basically stealing what was built by the sweat and blood of Soviet workers, during long decades.

Interference? Let me repeat: it was direct intervention, invasion, a grab of resources, shameless theft! I want to read and write about it, but we don’t hear much about it, anymore, do we?

Now we are told that Russia is paranoid, that its President is paranoid! With straight face, the West is lying; pretending that it has not been trying to murder Russia.

Those years… Those pro-Western years when Russia became a semi-client state of the West, or call it a semi-colony! There was no mercy, no compassion coming from abroad. Many of those idiots – kitchen intellectuals from Moscow and provinces – suddenly woke up but it was too late. Many of them had suddenly nothing to eat. They got what they were told to ask for: their Western ‘freedom and democracy’, and Western-style capitalism or in summary: total collapse.

I remember well how it was ‘then’. I began returning to Russia, horrified, working in Moscow, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Leningrad. Academics from Akadem Gorodok outside Novosibirsk were selling their libraries in the bitter cold, in dark metro underpasses of Novosibirsk… Runs on the banks… Old retired people dying from hunger and cold behind massive doors of concrete blocks… unpaid salaries and starving miners, teachers…

Russia under the deadly embrace of the West, for the first and hopefully last time! Russia whose life expectancy suddenly dropped to African Sub-Saharan levels. Russia humiliated, wild, in terrible pain.

Patriarch Kirill consecrates Alexander Nevsky monument dedicated to 800th anniversary of Alexander Nevsky — village of Samolva, Gdovsky district, Pskov, 11.09.2021

But that nightmare did not last long.

And what happened – those short but horrible years under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but above all under the Western diktat – will never be forgotten, not forgiven.

Russians know perfectly well what they do not want, anymore!

Russia stood up again. Huge, indignant and determined to live its own life, its own way. From an impoverished, humiliated and robbed nation, subservient to the West, the country evolved and within a few years, the free and independent Russia once again joined the ranks of the most developed and powerful countries on Earth.

And as before Gorbachev, Russia is once again able to help those nations which are under unjust and vicious attacks by the Western empire.

A man who is leading this renaissance, President Vladimir Putin, is tough, but Russia is under great threat and so is the world – this is no time for weaklings.

President Putin is not perfect (who is, really?), but he is a true patriot, and I dare say, an internationalist.

Now the West, once again, hates both Russia and its leader. No wonder; undefeated, strong and free Russia is the worst imaginable foe of Washington and its lieutenants.

That’s how the West feels, not Russia. Despite all that was done to it, despite tens of millions of lost and ruined lives, Russia has always been ready to compromise, even to forgive, if not forget.

Russia stood up again.

There is something deeply pathological in the psyche of the west. It cannot accept anything less than full and unconditional submission. It has to control, to be in charge, and on top of everything; it has to feel exceptional. Even when it murders and ruins the entire Planet, it insists on feeling superior to the rest of the world.

This faith in exceptionalism is the true Western religion, much more than even Christianity, which for decades has not really played any important role there. Exceptionalism is fanatical, it is fundamentalist and unquestionable.

It also insists that its narrative is the only one available anywhere in the World. That the West is seen as a moral leader, as a beacon of progress, as the only competent judge and guru.

Lies are piling on top of lies. As in all religions, the more absurd the pseudo-reality is, the more brutal and extreme are the methods used to uphold it. The more laughable the fabrications are, the more powerful the techniques used to suppress the truth are.

Today, hundreds of thousands of ‘academics’, teachers, journalists, artists, psychologists and other highly paid professionals, in all parts of the world, are employed by the Empire, for two goals only – to glorify the Western narrative and to discredit all that is standing in its way; daring to challenge it.

Russia is the most hated adversary of the West, with China, Russia’s close ally being near second.

The propaganda war unleashed by the West is so insane, so intense, that even some of the European and North American citizens are beginning to question tales coming from Washington, London and elsewhere.

Wherever one turns, there is a tremendous medley of lies, of semi-lies, half-truths; a complex and unnavigable swamp of conspiracy theories. Russia is being attacked for interfering in U.S. domestic affairs, for defending Syria, for standing by defenseless and intimidated nations, for having its own powerful media, for doping its athletes, for still being Communist, for not being socialist anymore; in brief: for everything imaginable and unimaginable.

Criticism of the country is so thorough and ludicrous, that one begins to ask very legitimate questions: “what about the past? What about the Western narrative regarding the Soviet past, particularly the post-Revolutionary period, and the period between two world wars?”

The more I analyze this present-day Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda, the more determined I am to study and write about the Western narrative regarding Soviet history. I’m definitely planning to investigate these matters in the future, together with my friends – Russian and Ukrainian historians.

… when only Victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about Russian armor.

In the eyes of the West, Russians are ‘traitors’.

Instead of joining the looters, they have been standing by the ‘wretched of the world’, in the past, as well as now. They refused to sell their Motherland, and to enslave their own people. Their government is doing all it can to make Russia self-sufficient, fully independent, prosperous, proud and free.

Remember that ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and many other terms, mean totally different things in distinctive parts of the world. What is happening in the West could never be described as ‘freedom’ in Russia or in China, and vice versa.

Frustrated, collapsing, atomized and egotistic societies of Europe and North America do not inspire even their own people, anymore. They are escaping by millions annually, to Asia, Latin America, and even to Africa. Escaping from emptiness, meaninglessness and emotional cold. But it is not Russia’s or China’s business to tell them how to live or not to live!

In the meantime, great cultures like Russia and China do not need, and do not want to be told by the Westerners, what freedom is, and what democracy is.

They do not attack the West, and expect the same in return.

It is truly embarrassing that the countries responsible for hundreds of genocides, for hundreds of millions of murdered people on all continents, still dare to lecture others.

Many victims are too scared to speak.

Russia is not.

It is composed, gracious, but fully determined to defend itself if necessary; itself as well as many other human beings living on this beautiful but deeply scarred Planet.

Russian culture is enormous: from poetry and literature, to music, ballet, philosophy… Russian hearts are soft, they easily melt when approached with love and kindness. But when millions of lives of innocent people are threatened, both the hearts and muscles of Russians quickly turn to stone and steel. During such moments, when only victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about Russian armor.

There is no match to Russian courage in the sadistic but cowardly West.

Irreversibly, both hope and future are moving towards the east.

And that is why Russia is desperately hated by the West.

Comprendre le marché européen de l’énergie – suite

Marché européen de l'énergie

Marché européen de l'énergieAprès avoir abordé les notions de base des mécanismes principaux du marché européen de l’énergie nous allons pouvoir comprendre l’interaction

L’article Comprendre le marché européen de l’énergie – suite est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

Macron s’en va en guerre…  (suite)

Le président Macron harangue les troupes françaises déployées en Roumanie

Le président Macron harangue les troupes françaises déployées en RoumanieCertains éléments rendus publics permettent de préciser l’analyse des possibles conséquences de l’engagement de l’armée française directement contre les forces

L’article Macron s’en va en guerre…  (suite) est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

La Russie a gagné parce que…

par Dominique Delawarde. Dans presque tous les domaines analysés, la supériorité russe était écrasante par rapport à l’Ukraine kiévienne et ne laissait aucune chance de succès à ce pays pour tout observateur impartial.

A Nuclear Drang?

Par : AHH

NATO headed for Nuclear war with Russia? Scott Ritter, Steve Starr, and Jose Vega with Diane Sare

https://web.archive.org/web/20220722045349/https://southfront.org/u-s-game-plan-to-conquer-russia-china-is-clarified/

[42:50] “… what that tells Russia now is that you have to strike EVERYTHING in Europe..”

A cornered Hegemon finds itself in a desperate cul-de-sac at a time of inflexion. Not being alarmist, but the moment is so acutely on the brink. Listen to Ritter carefully. The lunatic adherence to Exceptionalism of the West inexorably leads to the self-fulfilling and forced demonstration of the long-voiced “Nuclear Primacy Doctrine.” 

Each inadequate technocrat is so focused on the immediate square meter around his portfolio and specific role that the larger ramifications and linked consequences are lost. Politicians are busy demonstrating “strength” to Russia; military brass are busy drawing up “limited deep-strikes” which they trust will not provoke Russia into nuclear war; the media is busy obfuscating and lying to all, earning their daily bread as usual, crucially denying insight to those who can stop the madness or to the larger population.

In all this, Russia’s clearly stated warnings of triggers of spread of war to NATO countries and then likely nuclear war are ignored. Its right to self-defense and willingness and ability to escalate remain duly ignored. Europe is sleep-walking into predictable catastrophe. What good will it do the madmen if they state they do not intend to use nuclear weapons, but the cumulative actions they undertake so lower the threshold that it leads to a nuclear response?

«Plutôt mourir que de nous enrôler dans l’armée» – Affrontements entre les Haredi et la police d’occupation

Al-Manar. Les affrontements ont repris entre la police d’occupation israélienne et des manifestants Haredi lors de leur protestation, contre la loi d’enrôlement dans l’armée d’occupation israélienne.

Visa Says Palm Biometric Payments Have Promising Future

By Masha Borak Payments giant Visa showcased its pay-by-palm biometric payment technology at an event marking the transformation of its Singapore Innovation Center last week....

Visa Says Palm Biometric Payments Have Promising Future

How to Start Over After a Disaster

By Melonie Kennedy Take a look at the news any day of the week and you’ll see stories of people affected by disasters: from entire...

How to Start Over After a Disaster

Fabrication du consentement : Le fiasco de la frontière et le «mur intelligent»

par Whitney Webb. La détresse liée à la situation aux frontières est utilisée pour obtenir le consentement à des «solutions» axées sur l'extension de la surveillance et de la collecte biométrique, par opposition à la mise en place de barrières physiques.

Face à la faillite morale de l’Occident, quel avenir pour la Palestine ?

par Daniel Vanhove. Cet Occident et ses leçons de bonne gouvernance martelées à travers de grands discours vient de démontrer en quelques années, toute son hypocrisie, toute sa veulerie, menant irrémédiablement à sa faillite.

US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program Has 10-Year Backlog Of Claims

Authored by Megan Redshaw via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), It may take more than 10 years for someone injured by a COVID-19 vaccine to...

US Vaccine Injury Compensation Program Has 10-Year Backlog Of Claims

Documentary: Grid Down/Power Up

By Neenah Payne “The grid is something you probably don’t think much about until it goes out, which unfortunately is happening more and more in...

Documentary: Grid Down/Power Up

22.02.24 Speech of the Ansar Allah Leader

Par : AHH

The following is this week’s speech and cogent observations of the Yemeni leader on the state of the war against Zio-USUK, Gaza, and the wider region. He is every bit as sharp and wide ranging as Hezbollah’s Nasrallah. He gives his speech on Thursdays, the day before their now-regular million man marches in most cities of Yemen each Friday.

This week’s edition is a sober review of the ramifications of the latest UNSC veto and dismantling of the UN life-support systems by the US regime, the abjectness of the arab compradore hypocrites, the severely deteriorated plight of the poor starving Palestinians, and the losses and absolute barbarism of the savage zionist beast which is being steadily defeated in relentless and effective attrition.

@Yemen | Bab-el-Mandeb:
⭕ Statement from Sayyed Commander Abdulmalik Badraddin Al-Houthi regarding the latest developments and updates on 12 Sha’ban 1445 AH – 22-02-2024 AD:

— The oppressed Palestinian people in Gaza have been suffering for 20 weeks the most severe forms of suffering due to the Israeli aggression.
🔹The Israeli enemy in Gaza has pursued from the beginning a criminal and genocidal behavior, using all means of extermination.
🔹On the first day of the aggression, America, Britain, and most major European countries rushed to provide all forms of support to the Zionist enemy.
🔹Despite the immense military capabilities of the Israeli enemy, America and the West have provided it with weapons, money, and experts.

Where is the support of the [wealthy, powerful, neighboring] Muslims for the oppressed Palestinian people, who are part of them and have clear and established rights?
🔹The Palestinian people deserve support and solidarity for humanitarian reasons and all other considerations.
🔹Most countries, regimes, and governments are taking the stance of onlookers, some of them are complicit, and some secretly support the Israeli enemy.
🔹The betrayal of most governments and regimes, and the silence of the people, is one of the reasons for the boldness of the Israeli enemy to continue its crimes and tighten its siege.

For the third time, the American veto is used in the Security Council to prevent any decision to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
🔹America insists on continuing the genocide of the people of Gaza by all means of extermination. 
🔹The US provided the greatest cover for the starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza to reach blatant levels for countries and Western institutions.
🔹The US has used the veto power more than any other country since the formation of the Security Council to date in order to serve the Israeli enemy.
🔹The US is a key partner of the Israeli enemy in all its crimes against the Palestinian people in all past stages.
🔹The US inherited from the British the role of sponsoring the Zionist criminality and protecting the Israeli enemy, and providing all forms of support to it.
🔹The US turned the Security Council’s role and obstructed the role of the UN in any humanitarian direction in favor of the oppressed peoples.

— The responsibility of everyone, especially in the Muslim world, increases with the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the magnitude of the tragedy.
🔹What are Muslims waiting for to act? Do they want a full-blown genocide to happen to the people of Gaza?!
🔹The number of martyrs, mostly children and women, continues to rise, and the number of massacres reached 2,544, in a clear violation of human life.

— The Israeli enemy continues on its savage approach in preventing food for the people and disallowing trucks carrying food supplies from reaching the residents.
🔹The suspension of the World Food Program’s activities amid the painful levels of suffering and hunger in Gaza reveals the nature of its role.
🔹The malfeasance of the US and Israel is seen in their manipulating of international organizations and programs that operate under humanitarian titles.
🔹Deaths from starvation are on the rise, including children and the elderly.
🔹Animal feed has run out or is near depletion in many areas of the Gaza Strip, particularly in the northern part.
🔹Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are starving and appealing to their brethren through their hunger and suffering.

Where are the wealthy Arab countries that waste hundreds of billions of dollars on nonsense, trivial matters, and fueling sectarian strife yet do not offer food that is meager to the Palestinians?
🔹Many countries waste huge amounts of good food that ends up in their garbage cans, and their citizens suffer from obesity, without providing a thing of this food to the Palestinians.
🔹There are no serious and tangible moves by major Arab countries as if their role were confined to conflicts and destructive struggles that tear the nation from within.
🔹Why can’t the major Arab countries endeavor to play an honorable and positive role, even if it is something in the humanitarian vein, by delivering food, medicine, and aid to the residents of Gaza?
🔹We have seen some people’s seriousness during trivial issues when they dealt with it with great interest, and took various procedures from boycotting to waging wars.
🔹The Israeli enemy opened fire on a group of thousands of residents who were trying to obtain some food and flour, killing and wounding them.

— The Israeli enemy carried out cold-blooded executions while they were detained against the abductees, including children and women.

Where are the women’s rights that the West is bragging about, in front of the executions of women by the Israeli enemy?!
🔹The West does not repeat the slogan of women’s rights, except in immoral or trivial contexts, or to dismantle society from within.
🔹Women’s rights disappeared in the West when this woman was the Palestinian woman, and when the perpetrator and aggressor was the Israeli enemy.

— The Israeli enemy stormed the Nasser Medical Complex with tanks and drones, as if it were storming one of the largest military bases.
🔹The Israeli enemy targeted hospitals, even premature, infant, and patients of all categories.
🔹There is a real tragedy on the health side, and hundreds of thousands are suffering, and the most affected of them are the children.
🔹The Israeli enemy committed a heinous crime by forcibly kidnapping infant children from their mothers and separating thousands of children from their families during the displacement.
🔹There are 17,000 children separated from their families, according to unofficial statistics, and they are in a difficult situation.

— Given the scale of the tragedy, injustice and criminality, the Israeli enemy failed to achieve its declared goals, the most prominent of which is the return of its prisoners.
🔹The enemy has failed miserably in recovering its prisoners, despite the passage of 20 weeks of the war and in a [tiny] limited geographic area.
🔹The enemy was unable to eliminate the Mujahideen in Gaza, who are still holding on and fighting valiantly and effectively.
🔹The Mujahideen in Gaza are humiliating the enemy, despite living the same suffering that their families are experiencing in the sector.
🔹The enemy’s barbarism and its comprehensive targeting of the Palestinian people did not benefit it and did not obtain a picture of victory.

— The enemy accumulates its criminal record in terms of destruction, killing, siege and starvation, but it is becoming increasingly frustrated.
🔹 The enemy’s human losses are in the thousands, but it is trying to hide it and makes an effort in this regard.
🔹Some of the Zionist soldiers suffer from mental disorders as a result of the horrors of the battles and the clash with the Mujahideen from zero distance.
🔹The transformation of the Zionist soldier into a mentally ill or mentally disturbed person is a widespread condition among them because of their criminality and tyranny and their keenness to live.
🔹The psychological and moral harm is a disaster for the Zionists because their situation is shaky, they do not live in a state of reassurance.
🔹It is estimated that more than a million Zionists have fled the occupied territories, either permanently or temporarily, due to instability.
🔹There is a path for reverse migration because the Zionists live the act of existential threat.

— The enemy’s military losses are large and its economic losses are unprecedented, despite the huge American and Western support it enjoys.
🔹The Israeli currency is no longer stable, with a decline in foreign exchange reserves and a rise in public debt, and on the level of the large deficit in the enemy’s budget.
🔹There are repercussions in all economic fields from production and investment to labor shortage and the real estate sector.
🔹There is paralysis in the ports, a decline in tourism, and a decline in air navigation.
🔹There are terrible losses in the Israeli enemy’s economy, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars.
🔹The enemy’s losses are an important lesson despite the [western] support he enjoys.

— The enemy’s losses in confronting the modest capabilities of the Mujahideen in Gaza mean that it is an enemy that can be defeated, just as it was defeated in Lebanon and Gaza before.
🔹The support fronts continue from Lebanon with high efficiency and inflict major direct losses on the enemy.
🔹Brothers Mujahideen in Iraq continue, despite the enemy’s intensive targeting of them.

— In the Yemeni front, we have moved towards escalating our operations in response to the enemy’s increased escalation in the Gaza Strip.
🔹Our operations on “israeli” targets in the occupied lands have reached 183 missiles and drones.
🔹Support operations for Gaza in the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait are ongoing and we have escalated them.
🔹Escalation in sea operations has increased both in quantity and quality, with the activation of missiles, drones, and military boats.
🔹Submarines have been introduced into our naval operations, which is worrying for the enemy.
🔹The number of targeted ships in the sea reached 48, despite the enemy reducing its movement and camouflaging and withholding information about them.
🔹All means used by them to withhold information about the ships have been used and failed; we still manage to obtain accurate information.
🔹The available missiles have been developed to a level that the American cannot intercept or shoot down with all its technologies.
🔹There are significant real victories in the confrontation in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. There are real victories over American technologies, capabilities, and expertise. There are victories at the level of tactics, weapons, and means, and American experts were amazed by our Armed Forces’ tactics.

This week, 13 distinguished and effective operations were executed.
🔹Among the most prominent and important operations this week was the targeting of a British ship that was hit with a devastating strike that sank it.
🔹By Allah’s will, this week succeeded in downing an American MQ-9 drone, which is one of the most important American aircraft.

— The enemy failed before our sea operations; they were neither able to prevent them nor deter them nor limit them.
🔹Americans, their leaders, and officials admit, according to the established reality, that they failed to prevent Yemeni operations and protect their ships and those associated with the “israeli” entity. The American has put itself in trouble after its barges, destroyers, and military pieces were hit in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.
🔹The maritime situation halted 40% of the enemy’s commercial maritime movement, affecting its economy, shrinking its exports, and imports.

— The American has a military problem and admits that it has not faced such a problem since World War II, indicating the effectiveness of the Yemeni front.
🔹The British are implicated, harmed, foolish, and stupid for involving themselves in what does not concern them. British newspapers talk about the impacts on the British economy and predictions of a sharp increase in all prices due to the rise in shipping costs.
🔹Instead of aggression against Yemen, it was supposed to stop war crimes in Gaza and introduce aid to ensure regional stability and prevent the conflict from expanding.

— The number of American and British aggression raids on Yemen and missile strikes from the sea reached 278, yet they failed to destroy Yemeni capabilities and limit their impact.
🔹The American is causing our military capabilities to develop as it tries to move others and implicate them, including Europeans and some Arab countries.
🔹We will provide protection for any ships carrying aid to the people of Gaza, contrary to what the American propagates.

— One of the silliest new American propaganda is that Yemen is extorting some European countries to allow their ships to pass through the Red Sea without targeting them. Propaganda about extorting countries is silly and false, part of countless lies launched by hypocrites.

— Military mobilization is active, with military training outputs reaching 237,123 trainees as a popular army, preceded by hundreds of thousands trained appropriately.
🔹Military parades reached 248, maneuvers reached 566, and military marches reached 359.
🔹Popular stands are part of the distinguished and honorable activity, reaching 70,670, and awareness evenings reached 30,571.
🔹Events are very important for spreading awareness, reaching 23,738 events, and demonstrations reached 2,081 in provinces and directorates.

— The Yemeni people have set an example and become a source of admiration for all free people in the world and anyone with a human conscience.
🔹Our people’s stance in this phase is historic and will remain a proud lesson in freedom, dignity, and honor that generations will be proud of for thousands of years.

Mort de Navalny, colère agricole, guerre en Ukraine : ce qu’on retiendra de février 2024

Ukraine : inquiétude sur le front et à l’arrière

Le mois de février aura vu s’accumuler les mauvaises nouvelles pour l’Ukraine. Son armée est confrontée à une pénurie grave de munitions qui amène désormais en maints endroits de ce front de 1000 km le « rapport de feu » (nombre d’obus tirés par l’ennemi vs nombre d’obus qu’on tire soi-même) à près de dix contre un. Ce qui a contribué, après deux mois d’intenses combats et de pertes élevées, jusqu’à 240 chars russes, selon Kyiv, à la chute d’Adviivka, vendredi dernier. La conquête de cette ville que les Ukrainiens avaient repris aux forces soutenues par Moscou il y a dix ans constitue un gain politique pour le Kremlin à un mois d’une présidentielle au demeurant jouée d’avance ; aucun candidat vraiment d’opposition n’a été validé et tous les trouble-fêtes peuvent avoir en tête le sort d’Alexeï Navalny, décédé dans des circonstances qui restent à élucider dans un pénitencier de l’Arctique russe, le genre d’endroit où le régime enferme ceux qu’il ne souhaite pas voir vivre trop longtemps. La reprise d’Adviivka constitue aussi un gain tactique pour le Kremlin, puisqu’il rapproche le front de nœuds logistiques de l’armée ukrainienne.

Si Moscou, qui a perdu beaucoup d’hommes (vraisemblablement 300 000 à 500 000 hors de combats depuis le début de la guerre il y a deux ans), ne semble pas en position de percer la ligne de défense ukrainienne, il pourrait faire perdre du terrain à Kyiv en d’autres endroits, même si les opérations offensives sont désormais très compliquées, puisque le champ de bataille est devenu très transparent à cause de l’utilisation de simples drones d’observations capables de repérer le moindre char d’assaut ou groupe de fantassins. Seul lot de consolation pour l’Ukraine : elle a gagné, loin des projecteurs médiatiques, la « bataille de la mer Noire » en repoussant ces derniers mois les navires russes loin des corridors indispensables à l’exportation de ses céréales, et en coulant plusieurs navires, dont encore un il y a dix jours.

Autre revers pour Kyiv, l’aide cruciale de 60 milliards de dollars sur laquelle la Maison Blanche et les Républicains travaillent depuis des mois, est encalminée au Congrès. Certes, 22 sénateurs républicains sur 48, animés traditionnellement par une solide culture géopolitique héritée de la Guerre froide, et peu sensibles aux intimidations de Donald Trump, ont voté récemment pour ce paquet. Mais la majorité républicaine à la Chambre des représentants bloque toujours le texte sur instruction de Trump. Ce dernier ne veut en aucun cas faire cadeau d’un victoire politique à Joe Biden, à moins de neuf mois de la présidentielle qui verra certainement s’affronter les deux hommes. La Maison Blanche avait, erreur tactique, cru pouvoir obtenir un feu vert sur l’aide à l’Ukraine en la liant à celle à Israël et Taïwan, deux chevaux de bataille des Républicains, en sus de mesures sur l’immigration illégale en provenance du Mexique, sujet prioritaire des électeurs. Mais c’était prendre le risque de voir l’aide à Kyiv devenir otage d’autres sujets, ce qui n’a pas manqué d’arriver. L’administration Biden a, enfin, compris le danger et accepté il y a dix jours de dissocier un peu ces sujets ; mais trop tard, les trumpistes ont compris qu’ils tenaient là de quoi faire mordre la poussière à Biden, au risque de faire un cadeau au Kremlin, sous réserve que le deep state sécuritaire républicain ne se réveille pas.

Vague lueur d’espoir pour Kyiv toutefois, Donald Trump a laissé entendre récemment qu’il n’objecterait pas à une aide militaire à l’Ukraine si elle se faisait uniquement sous forme de prêts (ce qui est déjà le cas, en fait, pour un quart à un tiers de l’aide militaire occidentale). L’Europe va aussi s’efforcer de passer à la vitesse supérieure, malgré ses goulets d’étranglement dans la production, notamment d’obus, comme l’illustre la décision spectaculaire du Danemark, samedi, d’offrir l’intégralité de son artillerie à l’Ukraine, convaincue qu’en fait Kyiv défend le continent face aux ambitions du Kremlin.

Devant ces revers, comme régulièrement depuis le début de la guerre déclenchée il y a deux ans, samedi prochain, de beaux esprits évoquent une « fatigue » dans l’opinion publique occidentale, où pourtant les sondages indiquent toujours un soutien à l’Ukraine oscillant entre 60 et 75 % suivant les pays, ainsi que la nécessité d’une négociation. Certes, mais avec qui et sur quoi ?

En effet, un accord signé avec Poutine vaut-il plus que le papier sur lequel il est écrit ? Il a déchiré la quasi-totalité des traités signés par son pays depuis 1999. Et a assumé, c’est passé inaperçu, lors de son récent entretien avec le journaliste américain Tucker Carlson, qu’il n’avait « pas encore atteint ses buts de guerre en Ukraine ». En clair, l’annexion de quatre régions ukrainiennes ne lui suffit pas. Voilà pour les naïfs, voire pas si naïfs, qui prétendent que le Kremlin serait prêt à signer la paix en échange de quelques gains territoriaux. Ce que veut Poutine est clairement vassaliser l’ensemble de l’Ukraine et ridiculiser l’OTAN.

Dernier sujet préoccupant pour Kyiv, le président Volodymyr Zelensky, a limogé récemment son chef d’état-major, Valery Zaloujny, très populaire dans l’opinion, mais aussi et surtout parmi les soldats, pour le remplacer par Oleksandr Syrsky, unanimement détesté des hommes sur le front. Inquiétant, même si les dissensions sont au demeurant normales par temps de guerre. On oublie par exemple que, malgré l’union sacrée, le cabinet de guerre français a sauté trois fois suite à des désaccords sur la conduite des opérations et les buts de guerre en 14-18… Le défi pour l’Ukraine sera de changer de doctrine de combat, suite à l’échec de sa contre-offensive de juin-août, pour intégrer les nouvelles technologies : drones tueurs, brouillage des fréquences ennemies, ébauche d’utilisation d’intelligence artificielle (des pays occidentaux travaillent à fournir des essaims de drones bon marché opérant de manière synchronisée par utilisation de programmes d’AI simples).

 

Gaza : l’impasse

À court terme aucune issue, ni même une pause dans le conflit entre Israël et le Hamas ne semble être envisageable. Les négociations, qui avaient repris le 6 février au Caire sous médiation qatari, égyptienne et américaine en vue d’une pause de six semaines (à ne pas confondre avec un cessez-le-feu, qui suppose un arrêt indéfini des combats) en échange de la libération de tout ou partie des 100 otages que le Hamas détient encore, ont été interrompues il y a quelques jours. Le Hamas exige aussi la libération de centaines de ses militants détenus en Israël, dont des meurtriers, ce qui est une ligne rouge pour Jérusalem dont la majorité de l’opinion, selon les sondages, juge prioritaire d’éliminer le Hamas plutôt que de libérer les otages.

Le Premier ministre israélien se dit d’ailleurs plus que jamais déterminé à liquider intégralement le Hamas, avec notamment une offensive prochaine sur la ville de Rafah, dans le sud de la bande de Gaza où se seraient réfugiés les chefs militaires de l’organisation terroriste. Or, des dissensions commencent à se faire discrètement jour au sein de la hiérarchie militaire, et même parmi des ministres sur la possibilité d’éliminer entièrement le Hamas. Trois mois après le début de l’invasion de la bande de Gaza, selon les renseignements américains, Israël n’aurait mis hors de combat qu’un cinquième des quelques 40 000 combattants du Hamas. Certes, Tsahal a évité le piège de type Stalingrad que beaucoup lui promettait, avec des pertes relativement limitées pour trois mois d’opérations en milieu urbain, environ 200 soldats, et a détruit des dizaines de kilomètres de tunnels du Hamas.

Mais les victimes collatérales (le chiffre de 27 000 victimes, en grande majorité femmes et enfants, avancé par le Hamas semble plausible, pour une fois, par recoupement avec diverses données indépendantes) posent de plus en plus problème aux partenaires internationaux d’Israël, surtout les États-Unis, seul allié que Jérusalem écoute traditionnellement. Joe Biden s’est engagé fortement auprès d’Israël après les attentats du 7 octobre, avec déploiement de navires de guerre pour dissuader Téhéran ou le Hezbollah au Liban, approvisionnement en munitions, renseignements satellites. Ce dont l’aile gauche des Démocrates lui en fait grief… au risque de faire élire Donald Trump, soutien absolument inconditionnel de Jérusalem.

Reste le risque d’embrasement régional, évoqué à l’envi depuis quasiment le début de la guerre, le 7 octobre. Heureusement sans concrétisation, pour l’instant. En mode chien qui aboie ne mord pas, le Hezbollah, milice chiite libanaise soutenue par Téhéran, avait promis des représailles terribles « en temps et en heure » à différents raids israéliens, notamment l’élimination du numéro deux de la branche politique du Hamas à Beyrouth. De même, les ripostes des États-Unis et du Royaume-Uni contre les Houthis, missile yéménite soutenue aussi par Téhéran, qui menace de frapper les cargos transitant par le golfe d’Aden. Les frappes américaines sur le sol yéménite lui-même ont suscité des menaces de l’Iran. Sans rien pour l’instant.

 

Présidentielle américaine : Biden en pleine confusion et Trump dans ses trumperies 

Ce ne sera plus tenable longtemps. Si la Maison Blanche a joué les tauliers de l’Occident par une aide décisive (même si on peut aussi lui reprocher d’être « trop tard trop peu ») en Ukraine et un soutien vigilant d’Israël face au Hamas, force est de constater qu’une défaite de Joe Biden le 5 novembre face à Trump parait désormais probable.

Malgré le dynamisme économique, le président américain est terriblement impopulaire en raison de l’inflation. Les sondages le créditent de cinq points de retard sur son rival qui a le vent en poupe, puisqu’il devrait pousser à l’abandon sa dernière rivale, Nikki Haley après la primaire du 24 février en Caroline du Sud. Une victoire à peine six semaines après le début de la campagne des primaires serait sans précédent historique, et explique que si peu de ténors républicains osent tenir le moindre propos susceptible de déplaire aux trumpistes. Les sondages donnent aussi Trump gagnant dans les 5-7 swing states, ceux susceptibles de basculer dans un camp ou un autre, et qui feront l’élection : Arizona, Géorgie, Michigan, Pennsylvanie, Wisconsin, voire Caroline du Nord et Nevada.

Surtout, est apparu un fait nouveau et qui pourrait bientôt devenir intenable. Joe Biden multiplie les confusions qui ne sont plus seulement embarrassantes, à l’image des gaffes et trous de mémoire qu’il multiplie depuis longtemps. Cela touche désormais à sa capacité de gouverner. Comment croire que cet octogénaire pourrait prendre les bonnes décisions en cas de crise, en quelques minutes dans la war room par exemple, s’il prétend, comme il l’a fait dernièrement, avoir rencontré Mitterrand, décédé en 1995, en lieu et place d’Emmanuel Macron, ou le chancelier Kohl à la place d’Angela Merkel, et déclaré que le président égyptien Al Sissi était en fait celui du Mexique (Donald Trump a fait diffuser une carte du Proche-Orient où était calqué la carte du Mexique avec mention « source : Joe Biden »).

Enfin, une campagne américaine est une épreuve physique redoutable. Joe Biden a tenu le choc lors de la dernière uniquement parce qu’elle n’a pas eu lieu pour cause de covid. Problème, les Démocrates, divisés, indécis, et en panne d’idées et, il faut bien le dire, de lucidité, n’ont pas de plan B. Aucune personnalité connue, dotée d’un minimum de charisme et susceptible de faire consensus parmi les Démocrates n’a émergé en quatre ans, ce qui est une faute. La vice-présidente, Kamala Harris, n’a pas pris la lumière, elle est réputée ne pas avoir la carrure, comme l’illustre son parcours peu convaincant. Surtout, juridiquement, il semble très difficile d’annuler les primaires démocrates, pour lesquelles un certain nombre de délégués pro Biden ont été désignés. Seule issue, un avis médical sollicité par les ministres du président, terrible responsabilité et trahison, pour déclarer qu’il n’est plus en capacité d’exercer ses fonctions, selon la Constitution. Jamais un candidat bénéficiant du désistement au dernier moment du président en exercice n’a gagné la présidentielle…

L’affaire est d’autant plus cruciale que, bien évidemment, l’élection du président du pays le plus puissant du monde, militairement et économiquement, ne concerne pas que les Américains et que Donald Trump a raconté publiquement, il y a dix jours, avoir déclaré à un chef de gouvernement européen (allemand ?) qu’il ne viendrait pas à son secours si la Russie l’attaquait. On peut essayer de se rassurer à bon compte en se persuadant qu’il s’agissait d’un procédé rhétorique, ou d’une technique de négociation un peu rude pour obtenir, légitimement, que les Européens prennent plus au sérieux leur sécurité. Mais force est de constater, et ce discours de Trump représente de ce point de vue un évènement géopolitiquement majeur, malheureusement, tranchant avec une jurisprudence constante à Washington depuis 1949. La sécurité collective de l’Alliance atlantique repose en effet sur le fait que si un quelconque de ses 31 membres est attaqué, chacun des autres volera à son secours de manière inconditionnelle, sans émettre des si et des mais. Tout l’inverse de ce qu’a déclaré Trump qui assume que dans ce cas là il pourrait dire « désolé, je ne suis pas très motivé, regardons d’abord si vous avez réglé vos factures ». De la musique aux oreilles du Kremlin, de nature à le convaincre qu’une aventure en Pologne, ou en pays Balte serait opportune pour discréditer définitivement son ennemi juré, l’Alliance atlantique…

 

Menaces sur l’économie chinoise

Les nuages s’accumulent sur la Chine, deuxième économie mondiale et qui a réalisé depuis 1979 une performance sans équivalent historique, une croissance de 6 à 10 % par an pour un pays à l’époque d’environ un milliard d’habitants.

Sa croissance ralentit et n’aurait même pas dépassé 0,8 % au dernier trimestre. En cause : le vieillissement de la population, conséquence de la politique de l’enfant unique en vigueur jusqu’à récemment en sus de la chute de désir d’enfant, comme en Occident ; le chômage des jeunes au plus haut depuis des temps immémoriaux ; la moindre dynamique des exportations liées à la conjoncture mondiale ainsi qu’à une certaine défiance post covid envers Pékin ; sans doute les imites rencontrées par un système totalitaire à l’ère de l’innovation technologique ; et les menaces sur le système bancaire en raison de l’accumulation de créances douteuses sur le secteur immobilier après des années de spéculation, illustrées par ces images vertigineuses de tours fantômes construites pour être condamnées à la destruction.

La mise en liquidation, le 29 janvier dernier par un tribunal de Hong Kong, du groupe Evergrande, principal promoteur immobilier du pays, après deux années d’agonie est venue rappeler le danger, même s’il n’a pas, pour l’heure, provoqué d’effets dominos comme aux États-Unis la faillite de Lehman Brothers en 2008. Le secteur immobilier pèse pour un tiers du PIB chinois, contre un dixième en France. Les prix des logements ont chuté en deux ans de 30 %, du jamais vu. Les bourses chinoises sont par ailleurs atones et le président Xi Jinping a dû convoquer récemment les régulateurs des marchés financiers pour leur demander de doper un peu la conjoncture, notamment par un allègement des règles de réserves obligatoires des banques. Sans résultat spectaculaire. Un défi politique pour les autorités, puisque les Chinois sont habitués depuis trente ans à des perspectives de progression de leur revenu…

 

Union européenne : les agriculteurs se rebiffent

C’est un événement important dans l’histoire de l’Union européenne qui s’est déroulé ces dernières semaines, à coups de cortèges de tracteurs klaxonnant dans les principales villes d’Europe.

Les agriculteurs, pourtant en majorité très pro-européens, notamment parce qu’ils bénéficient, pour la majorité d’entre eux, du système d’administration des marchés avec prix garantis peu ou prou dans les céréales, certaines viandes, produits laitiers, ont manifesté massivement. À rebours de l’adage « on ne mord pas la main qui vous nourrit », et peut-être parce que ladite main ne nourrit plus tant que ça ceux qui nous nourrissent, comme le résumait un cortège espagnol ; « laissez-nous bosser, carajo ! ». Pas un hasard si le mouvement est parti, il y a presque un an, des Pays-Bas où un plan d’écologie punitive avait prévu, au nom de la désormais omniprésente lutte en Occident contre le réchauffement climatique (une vertu qui permet de massacrer agriculture et industrie sous le regard goguenard ou stupéfait du reste du monde, et qui ne les incite en tout cas pas à nous emboiter le pas), la disparition de la moitié du cheptel.

Les Allemands ont pris le relais début janvier, suivis par leurs confrères français, puis italiens, belges, espagnols, polonais, roumains. Ce mouvement spectaculaire, avec des blocages inédits de centres- villes en Allemagne, et la panoplie habituelle en France de lisier déversé, mais des blocages d’autoroutes sur 400 km (sans précédent) ont pu avoir des motifs divers, prix de vente trop bas (donc, appel, comme d’habitude, à subventions), la concurrence ukrainienne, avaient pour revendication centrale la réduction drastique de la réglementation d’origine, le plus souvent écologique (les associations écologistes ont beau prétendre être les alliées des agriculteurs, ce discours ne convainc pas ces derniers qui savent sous la pression de qui on les bride depuis des années), ou sanitaire au nom d’un principe de précaution devenu absolu. En clair, les agriculteurs ne supportent plus les exigences des plans écolos européens Green Deal et Farm to Fork, même si leurs représentants n’osent pas trop le dire.

Si le gouvernement Attal a su apaiser les grands syndicats agricoles par des chèques et promesses, notamment d’une pause (mais pas annulation) du plan de réduction impératif de 50 % des traitements phytosanitaires d’ici 2030, avec chute des rendements, donc à la clé des revenus, martingale française inépuisable, et si Bruxelles a accordé une dérogation pour les jachères, les agriculteurs se rendent compte que cela ne résout pas du tout le problème « bureaucratie/punitions ». La FNSEA, qui ne se résout pas à s’attaquer aux programmes européens Green Deal et Farm to Fork, menace de reprendre les manifestations à la veille du Salon de l’agriculture, dans quelques jours.

Que le soufflé de cette contestation inédite par le nombre de pays concernés, quoique sans synchronisation, retombe ou pas, il aura déjà eu un mérite : le grand public a découvert le poids dément des règlementations en milieu rural, qui punissent tout et son contraire, la nécessité d’obtenir x autorisations pour tailler une haie, curer un fossé, le calendrier des semis, traitements… comme l’illustre ce slogan d’agriculteurs espagnols « mais laissez-nous bosser, carajo ! ».

 

En France, l’horizon indépassable des règlements partout, tout le temps

Une bataille clé dans la guerre culturelle entre la réglementation tous azimuts, qui ne se confine pas à l’agriculture, comme prétend d’ailleurs l’admettre depuis peu le gouvernement et qu’illustre cette savoureuse révélation, parmi mille autres : un employé de mairie ne peut pas changer une ampoule sans suivre trois jours de formation. Eh oui, nos vies sont régies par une dizaine de codes de 4000 pages, qui s’enrichissent de plusieurs pages chaque jour.

De quoi rappeler le fameux texte de Tocqueville sur « le réseau de petites règles compliquées, minutieuses et uniformes » édictée par un pouvoir « immense et tutélaire, qui se charge seul d’assurer la jouissance des citoyens et de veiller sur leur sort. Il est absolu, détaillé, régulier, prévoyant et doux ».

Tout cela a poussé le ministre de l’Économie, Bruno Le Maire (qui a dû se résoudre, dimanche soir, à annoncer une révision à la baisse, de 1,4 à 1 % de la prévision de la croissance française en 2024, évoquant la guerre en Ukraine, le Moyen-Orient, le ralentissement économique très marqué en Chine et la récession technique de 0,3 % du principal partenaire commercial de la France, l’Allemagne), à dénoncer « un suicide européen » par les entraves règlementaires, et à promettre il y a quelques semaines, à plusieurs reprises, un vaste effort de simplification… avant d’annoncer aussitôt des contrôles sévères sur la grande distribution, bouc émissaire, pour vérifier qu’elle pratique des marges raisonnables sur les produits alimentaires.

De même, le gouvernement a découvert récemment, sans promptitude excessive, que les normes DPE constituaient une véritable bombe sociale puisqu’elle imposait des dépenses insupportables aux ménages modestes voulant louer un bien pour le mettre en conformité (en attendant d’interdire aussi leur vente, voire, tant qu’on y est dans le fanatisme vert, leur occupation par les propriétaires). Ce qui contribue au blocage spectaculaire du marché de la location depuis deux ans.

Miracle, une étude technique vient démontrer que les DPE ne sont pas fiables pour les logements de moins de 40 m2 ouvrant droit à dérogation. Un peu tartuffe, mais c’est déjà ça… Il faudra surveiller la suite, du fait de la nomination d’un nouveau ministre du Logement, Guillaume Kasbarian, qui assume vouloir provoquer un « choc de l’offre », en clair stimuler la construction de logements et leur mise à disposition sur le marché locatif. Un discours bienvenu, pour ne pas dire déconcertant, tant il est à rebours de ce à quoi nous habituent les ministres d’Emmanuel Macron.

Selon ses déclarations à l’issue, jeudi, d’une rencontre avec des représentants du secteur, il s’agit de rénover un processus de rénovation énergétique « comportant trop de lourdeurs administratives ». Sur la table, notamment la limitation des obligations de recourir à un accompagnateur agréé aux subventions de rénovation les plus élevées. Il s’agit aussi de permettre aux propriétaires de logements à étiquette énergétique G, a priori aux revenus les plus modestes, qui ne pourront plus être mis en location à partir du 1er janvier 2025, de les aider à commencer à améliorer la performance de leur bien.

 

France-sur-mer : le sujet empoisonné de l’immigration fait son grand retour

Le sujet de l’immigration, en mode sparadrap du capitaine Haddock, hante plus que jamais la politique française, avec un exécutif au sommet du « Enmêmptentisme », chèvre-chou, qui cherche à séduire des électeurs de droite (comme si ceux de gauche classique ne pouvaient pas objecter aux changements fondamentaux à l’œuvre dans notre pays depuis quatre ou cinq décennies, illustrés par une comparaison, au hasard, entre deux photos de classe 2024-1974 ?) sans perdre ceux de gauche. Dilemme d’autant plus sensible que le parti Renaissance est crédité de 18,5 % des suffrages aux européennes de juin, très loin des 29 % attribués, selon un sondage, au Rassemblement national.

L’Élysée a remporté une première manche tactique en demandant aux députés Renaissance de voter pour la loi immigration avec Les Républicains et le Rassemblement nationale… pour aussitôt en déférer les amendements Les Républicains au Conseil constitutionnel. Voter pour un texte qu’on espère anticonstitutionnel, c’est nouveau… Lequel Conseil constitutionnel a eu l’obligeance d’invalider 32 des amendements « droitiers » pour vice de procédure, qui ne se rattachaient pas à un élément précis, un article, du texte proposé. Il avait pourtant validé un amendement sur Mayotte en 2018 dans une loi qui ne traitait pourtant ni de Mayotte ni d’immigration…

Deuxième manche, le ministre de l’Intérieur, Gérald Darmanin, s’est rendu récemment à Mayotte, plus grande maternité d’Europe (25 naissances par jour, cinq fois plus que la seule Corrèze) pour annoncer ce que les élus de tous bords y attendent depuis longtemps : la fin du droit du sol. Au prix, puisqu’une loi ne peut pas être en vigueur dans un département, et pas sur l’ensemble du territoire national selon la Constitution, d’une révision de cette dernière. Ouvrant ainsi une boîte de Pandore, car ce principe d’une territorialisation d’une loi pourrait s’appliquer plus tard sur bien d’autres sujets. Il semble bien qu’il n’ait pas échappé à l’exécutif que la question devenue incandescente, voire civilisationnelle de l’immigration risque de rapporter gros aux élections européennes de juin prochain.

Une réforme du droit du sol sur l’ensemble du territoire n’aurait au demeurant rien de choquant et ne ferait pas basculer la France, contrairement à ce que prétendent les beaux esprits immigrationnistes, dans « les heures les plus sombres de notre histoire », pour la bonne raison que le droit du sang prioritaire est pratiqué par de nombreux pays pas franchement gouvernés à l’extrême droite.

Au demeurant, et cela illustre au passage combien le dossier de l’immigration à Mayotte est instrumentalisé, le droit du sol dit sec, c’est-à-dire l’obtention automatique de la nationalité du pays où l’on naît quelle que soit celle de ses parents et leur propre lieu de résidence et/ou de naissance, n’existe presque plus nulle part au monde. Et notamment pas en Europe, où les pays les plus souples là-dessus, la France, l’Espagne et la Belgique, pratiquent plutôt le « double droit du sol » : on obtient automatiquement, ou sur demande la nationalité française à l’adolescence si un des deux parents étrangers, même en situation irrégulière, est lui-même né en France, même en situation irrégulière, sous réserve qu’il ait séjourné en France un nombre suffisant d’années.

Le problème étant que les habitants des Comores, manipulés en outre par un régime dictatorial voyant dans cette émigration un moyen commode de déstabiliser une « puissance coloniale » à qui ils réclament la restitution de Mayotte, ignorent ces subtilités juridiques et que, motivées par la chimère d’une nationalité française automatique, avec ses droits et avantages pour l’enfant qu’elles portent, des Comoriennes enceintes se ruent à Mayotte pour y accoucher. Face à la désinformation aux Comores (en sus des autres facteurs d’immigration clandestine massive d’hommes jeunes cherchant une terre promise où les salaires sont huit fois supérieurs à ceux en vigueur chez eux à quelques heures de navigation) des ajustements constitutionnels sur le droit du sol, à la majorité, difficile, des trois cinquièmes au Congrès, risquent de ne pas changer grand-chose.

Le Carême pour les débutants

Pourquoi y a-t-il un carnaval ? Qu’est-ce que le mercredi des Cendres ? Quelle est la signification du Carême ? Dans ce nouveau numéro d’Urbi et Orbi, Edouard Husson répond à ces questions devenues mystérieuses pour de nombreux Français.

Ces points nous donnent l’occasion de déplorer l’extinction progressive de la culture religieuse, qui est une partie intégrante de la culture française.

Le Courrier est heureux de contribuer à combler une partie de ces lacunes…

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Le Maire et l’austérité : 7 ans de recul coupable devant la bureaucratie proliférante

Piteux, Bruno Le Maire a expliqué dans le poste, hier, qu’il préparait un plan d’économies par voie “réglementaire” à hauteur de 10 milliards, pour compenser la stagnation économique (la croissance devrait tomber à 1% au lieu des 1,4% imprudemment retenus en septembre pour le budget 2024). Mais tout n’est pas encore très clair, et on sent beaucoup d’improvisation dans ces annonces. Visiblement, 5 milliards seraient prélevés sur le budget de fonctionnement des administrations de l’Etat. 5 autres milliards seraient prélèves un peu partout ailleurs. Mais Bruno Le Maire a annoncé à mots couverts une loi de finance rectificative pour l’été. Cette séquence met un (timide) terme à 7 ans de reculade peu glorieuse devant la nécessaire réforme de l’Etat.

Donc, selon Bruno Le Maire, il faut immédiatement 10 milliards d’économies (un décret d’annulation de crédits serait en préparation, ce qui, pour un mois de février, est si précoce que cela relève de l’amateurisme) pour éviter la déroute. Nos lecteurs ne sont pas surpris, puisque nous annonçons les difficultés économiques de l’année 2024 depuis plusieurs mois (je republie ci-dessus une capsule du 15 octobre qui évoquait la question).

Ce qui amuse plutôt, c’est l’incapacité de Bruno Le Maire à gérer les finances de l’Etat, dans la plus parfaite satisfaction des salons parisiens.

Ainsi, en juin, Bruno Le Maire avait annoncé une baisse de 5% des budgets des administrations… qui n’est jamais intervenue. Nous avions annoncé, à l’époque, que la survenue de ce problème affaiblirait Macron.

Finalement Bruno Le Maire avait décidé de simplement supprimer le bouclier tarifaire à hauteur de 12 milliards. Au lieu d’attaquer les fonctionnaires, on attaque les contribuables.

En novembre et décembre, Elisabeth Borne avait lancé des discussions pour mener une nouvelle “revue des politiques publiques” destinée à diminuer les dépenses et à éviter une dégradation de la note de la France. Cette gesticulation avait permis d’écarter provisoirement le danger. Puis, plus rien.

Entretemps, le Premier Ministre a changé et la méthode est plus frustre désormais : on prend des décrets pour taper dans les dépenses.

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Mais qui peut bien détrousser les classes moyennes ?

On l’a compris, les classes moyennes et leur colère sont au coeur de la lutte politique qui s’ouvre dans les perspectives de 2027 : il faut “récupérer” les classes moyennes, qui se détournent chaque jour un peu plus de la démocratie, et de l’obéissance aux âneries que la caste professe sans vergogne. Ces classes moyennes se sentent flouées et tondues méthodiquement par un système qui ne leur profite plus. Mais comment analyser et comprendre ce sentiment ? Nous faisons le point aujourd’hui sur les gagnants et les perdants de notre système.

Le désespoir des classes moyennes en France s’explique-t-il rationnellement ? La réponse est oui, bien sûr, et pour le comprendre, il faut procéder à l’anatomie de la redistribution en France :

  • 25% de la population profite massivement de la redistribution
  • les 50% du “milieu” (les classes moyennes) participent au jeu de chaise musicale, et n’en tire aucun vrai bénéfice
  • dans ces 50%, tous ceux qui font mine de tirer leur épingle du jeu sont rattrapés illico par l’impôt
  • les 25% disposant du niveau de vie le plus élevé sont les contributeurs nets de la redistribution : ils abandonnent une part importante de leur revenu à l’amélioration du sort des 25% les moins dotés

Dans cet ensemble, les statistiques montrent qu’il existe une grande constante dans la répartition des richesses depuis une vingtaine d’années : les inégalités n’ont ni augmenté, ni diminué…

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La dernière farce de Navalny  

par Dominique Delawarde. À chaque fois qu’une élection russe se profile, un opposant de Vladimir Poutine disparaît dans des conditions troubles. Nous avons déjà eu droit à de nombreux feuilletons abracadabrantesques.

Une balance commerciale impossible à redresser ?

Le service des douanes vient de faire connaître le résultat de notre commerce extérieur pour 2023 : à nouveau un solde négatif important de 99,6 milliards d’euros. Certes, c’est mieux que l’année précédente où le déficit avait été supérieur à cause de l’envolée des prix de l’énergie causée par la guerre en Ukraine, mais le solde est négatif, une fois de plus.

La balance du commerce extérieur français est donc régulièrement déficitaire depuis 2005, c’est-à-dire depuis maintenant une vingtaine d’années. Ce solde négatif a plutôt tendance à s’aggraver, comme le montre le tableau ci-dessous :

Selon le journal La Tribune du 7 février dernier, annonçant les résultats de notre commerce extérieur pour l’année 2023 :

« Les années se suivent et se ressemblent pour la balance commerciale française : le déficit commercial de 99,6 milliards est le deuxième plus élevé de l’histoire ».

On ne peut évidemment que s’inquiéter d’une telle évolution, d’autant que les autres pays de l’Union européenne dont les balances commerciales étaient également déficitaires dans les années 1970-80, sont parvenus à redresser la barre, comme le montre le tableau suivant :

Autre constat : c’est la balance des biens qui est particulièrement dégradée, les services étant là pour rattraper quelque peu le grave déséquilibre des biens :

 

Le rôle déterminant du secteur industriel

Longtemps, les commentateurs de notre vie économique ont expliqué le déficit du commerce extérieur par des éléments conjoncturels, généralement des variations des prix de l’énergie, la France étant un gros importateur d’hydrocarbures. Mais, à présent, chacun a bien compris que le déficit de la balance du commerce provient du déclin industriel français. En effet, l’industrie joue un rôle déterminant dans la balance commerciale des pays développés, intervenant pour environ 75 % dans les échanges commerciaux.

Aussi, si l’on examine la relation existant dans les pays développés entre l’importance de leur production industrielle et le résultat de leur balance commerciale, on voit que les pays à production industrielle faible ont des balances commerciales déficitaires, alors que les pays à production industrielle élevée présentent des balances commerciales positives.

C’est ce que montre le tableau ci-dessous où figurent, dans la première colonne, les productions industrielles des pays comptées en valeur ajoutée par habitant, comme le font les comptabilités nationales des pays, et selon les données de la BIRD, qui incorpore la construction dans la définition de l’industrie :

Le graphique ci-dessous indique la corrélation existant entre ces données :

L’équation de la droite de corrélation indique que pour avoir une balance commerciale équilibrée il faut que la production industrielle s’élève à 11 265 dollars par habitant. C’est une probabilité statistique qui peut souffrir chaque année des écarts par rapport à la moyenne.

Or, la France ne dispose que de 7200 dollars de production industrielle par personne. Il faudrait donc l’accroître de 56 % pour que la balance commerciale soit à l’équilibre. En se basant sur les ratios d’intensité capitalistique des entreprises industrielles existant déjà en France, cela signifie un effectif industriel passant de 2,7 millions de personnes à 4,2 millions : soit 1,5 million d’emplois industriels à créer pour que, demain, la balance commerciale soit régulièrement en équilibre. Les effectifs industriels de l’Allemagne étant bien plus élevés, de l’ordre de 7 millions de personnes, sa balance commerciale est régulièrement excédentaire. En fait, avec la quatrième révolution industrielle en cours, baptisée industrie 4.0, les intensités capitalistiques sont devenues extrêmement élevées : il va plutôt s’agir de la création de seulement environ un million d’emplois.

La corrélation mise en évidence permet de comprendre que le solde déficitaire de notre balance commerciale, rappelé plus haut, se soit régulièrement dégradé à mesure que notre secteur industriel faiblissait : entre la fin des Trente Glorieuses et aujourd’hui, l’industrie qui intervenait pour 24 % à 25% dans la formation du PIB n’intervient plus que pour 10 % seulement. La France est devenue le pays européen qui est le plus désindustrialisé, la Grèce mise à part. Avec la crise du covid, nos dirigeants ont finalement compris qu’il était nécessaire de réindustrialiser le pays, et Emmanuel Macron a lancé le Plan France 2030. Mais il sera extrêmement difficile de remonter la pente.

Dans le Figaro-économie du 12 février dernier, Anne de Guigné énonce :

« Après des années de délitement, l’industrie française a cessé de dépérir. Mais crier victoire paraît très exagéré quand les deux indicateurs les plus robustes du secteur, l‘évolution de la production manufacturière et celle de la valeur ajoutée de l’industrie demeurent en zone grise ».

Le Plan France 2030 est très insuffisant, car les moyens financiers manquent pour épauler le redressement de notre industrie, comme le font si bien maintenant les Américains avec l’IRA, un dispositif d’aide à l’investissement qui dispose d’un budget de 369 milliards de dollars.

 

Les PME appelées à la rescousse

Pour redresser rapidement notre commerce extérieur, le gouvernement a appelé les PME à la rescousse afin qu’elles exportent. Il veut faire passer le nombre d’entreprises exportatrices de 145 700 à 200 000. Dans son discours de Roubaix le 23 février 2018, Édouard Philippe avait annoncé la création de Team France Export, afin d’encourager les PME  à « chercher des aventures à l’étranger ». Team France Export est un dispositif au service des entreprises qui regroupe les services de l’État s’occupant d’exportation, Business France, Bpifrance, et les diverses CCI existant en France. Cet organisme dispose de 13 guichets régionaux, disséminés sur tout le territoire, et un réseau de 750 conseillers installés à l’étranger dans 65 pays. Précédemment, avait été créée en 2015, « Business France », une agence nationale ayant pour mission d’« aider les PME et les ETI à se projeter à l’international ». Nos entreprises ne sont donc pas dépourvues de conseillers pour les aider à exporter, et elles peuvent bénéficier de divers soutiens financiers pour prospecter à l’étranger et exporter.

Cette ambition de faire de nos petites PME industrielles, des entreprises exportatrices, n’est en fait pas très raisonnable : c’est leur faire courir beaucoup de risques et les détourner de leur tâche principale qui est, à ce stade de leur croissance, de développer et renforcer leurs avantages compétitifs. Hors les grandes entreprises, qui, elles, disposent du personnel voulu pour exporter, et dont les reins sont assez solides pour faire face aux aléas des opérations à mener dans des pays lointains que l’on connait mal, seules les ETI, (250 à 500 employés), sont capables d’avoir une politique suivie à l’exportation.

En matière d’exportation, le drame de la France est qu’elle dispose de relativement peu d’ETI, à la différence de l’Allemagne ou de la Grande-Bretagne : elles sont 5760 en France, contre 12 500 en Allemagne et 10 000 en Grande-Bretagne, et ne sont pas toutes dans le secteur industriel, loin de là. Pour exporter des biens industriels, il faut généralement avoir à l’étranger des accords avec des entreprises locales qui aideront les consommateurs à utiliser ces équipements et assureront l’après- vente, car faire de l’après-vente à partir de la France est une gageure. Ces partenaires étrangers exigeront que l’entreprise avec laquelle ils vont collaborer ait une certaine dimension : s’il s’agit d’une PME de taille modeste, ils ne seront pas partants et auront tendance à aller chercher ailleurs un exportateur plus solide avec lequel s’allier. Une PME peut exporter aisément, sans risque, des produits ne nécessitant aucune collaboration avec l’acheteur, et notamment pas d’après-vente, comme par exemple, la cristallerie ou les articles de porcelaine.

Augmenter les exportations et avoir une balance commerciale à l’équilibre sont donc des missions extrêmement ardues :

  • le secteur industriel s’est considérablement amenuisé, l’industrie manufacturière ne représente plus que 10 % du PIB, contre 23 % ou 24 % pour l’Allemagne.
  • le pays manque d’entreprises de taille intermédiaire, soit deux fois moins que l’Allemagne.

 

Rééquilibrer notre balance du commerce extérieur, mission qui est confiée au ministre chargé du Commerce extérieur, est une tâche de très longue haleine qui va demander de très nombreuses années, c’est-à-dire le temps que nos dirigeants mettront pour accroître de 56 % la production du secteur industriel.

A Different Kind of Survivor

By Fabian Ommar “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” ~ C.S. Lewis Sometimes, we get too caught up in our preparations, endlessly...

A Different Kind of Survivor

Absurdités anglo-américaines au milieu du génocide des Palestiniens

par Amar Djerrad. Les politiques américaines sont basées sur la menace ! L’esprit des dirigeants américains est forgé dans le bluff, l’arrogance, l’égocentrisme, la cupidité et l’insolence !

Pourquoi Medvedev est libre de la jouer «Born to Be Wild»

par Pepe Escobar. La seule chose qui compte est l'obsession aveugle pour le pouvoir total, le «rictus du commandement froid» affirmant la perpétuité d'un «ordre international fondé sur des règles» flou.

Ça balance pas mal à DC, par Florent Machabert

Par : Rédaction

L’info de la semaineFinalement, la baisse des taux n’est pas pour tout de suite… Une gouverneure de la Réserve fédérale a estimé cette semaine qu’une baisse des taux d’intérêt aux États-Unis n’était pas encore justifiée malgré la perspective donnée fin 2023 par le patron de la FED (les lecteurs de Finance & Tic savent déjà combien nous trouvions cette annonce prématurée) de plusieurs baisses en 2024. La décision de desserrer la politique monétaire (de « reflater », dans le jargon des banquiers centraux) reste donc incertaine quant à son horizon, en raison des risques persistants (notamment géopolitiques) qui pourraient faire repartir l’inflation. Bien que certains signes montrent une stabilisation de l’économie et que l’industrie US se porte globalement bien, notamment grâce au programme IRA d’aide à la délocalisation sur le sol américain des entreprises européennes, d’autres indicateurs pointent en revanche la faiblesse du marché du travail, comme la baisse du temps de travail hebdomadaire moyen, qui, à elle seule, faire craindre de nouvelles suppressions d’emplois.

Enfin, la perspective de l’élection présidentielle en novembre prochain ajoute une dimension politique à ces préoccupations, alors que les candidats, y compris l’ancien président Donald Trump, s’inquiètent de la santé économique de leur pays. Pas Joe Biden, certes, qui se demande où est bien passé François Mitterrand.

Le chiffre de la semaine

129,5 Mds €, le total des crédits immobiliers octroyés en France en 2023

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Comment Alfred Grosser (1925-2024) a transformé nos dirigeants en eunuques gardiens des intérêts du couple germano-américain

Alfred Grosser, patriarche des études françaises sur l’Allemagne, est mort hier 7 février 2024 à Paris, à l’âge de 99 ans. Je vois beaucoup d’éloges. Mais je n’ai jamais pensé que les oraisons funèbres doivent être des panégyriques – surtout pour des personnages publics. Brisons les idoles. Dans le cas de Grosser, il faut dire les choses: cet homme a dominé et stérilisé à la fois les études françaises sur l’Allemagne des années 1950 aux années 1990. Et cela a eu des conséquences catastrophiques pour la politique de la France face à l’Allemagne. Suivre la méthode grosserienne, qui visait à écarter tous les sujets qui fâchaient entre la France et l’Allemagne, a transformé des générations de dirigeants en eunuques gardiens des intérêts du couple germano-américain.

Quelques souvenirs personnels, pour commencer!

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Leave the Predictive Programming Behind

By Melissa Dykes The timing of Zuck’s doomsday bunker breaking right after the release of the Obamas’ new apocalyptic film featuring doomsday bunkers cannot be...

Leave the Predictive Programming Behind

Que signifie la démesure actuelle ?

par Marie-France de Meuron. Lors de la covidémie, des démesures effarantes ont illustré à quel point des systèmes qui dirigent ou gèrent la société reçoivent ou subissent des impulsions portant à des conséquences dévastatrices.

The Houthis & Yemen: A History

Par : AHH

Guest: Shireen Al-Adeimi is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and assistant professor of language and literacy at Michigan State University’s College of Education.

More versions of the podcast at:

The Houthis & Yemen: A History

An eloquent short historical profile of the Ansarullah movement by a fair critic from south Yemen. She is from Aden, the traditional rival of north Yemen of the last centuries, and the third most important global sea port in the 19th century.

She dispels Anglo-Zionist agitprop that Yemenis serve Iran, or that Ansarullah are a minority; they control 80-85% of the total population that lives bunched in the smaller but more secure highland north. Zaidi Islam is followed by 40% of all Yemenis and coexists peacefully with Sunni and Shia, being not of either, but a bridge respected by all except fringe salafi extremists imported from the GCC. She reminds us that ALL Yemenis have been devotees of Palestine and their liberation cause for over a century now, starting with the British occupation.

Ansarullah represent and merely discharge the will of at least 30-32 Million of the 40 M Yemenis. 

Pour défendre ses profits, Pfizer réduit ses coûts et comprime son personnel

Si les activités de Pfizer ont connu un développement remarquable pendant la crise du covid, la fin de l’état d’urgence sanitaire lié au Covid-19 aux États-Unis a entraîné une diminution significative de ses revenus au troisième trimestre 2023. Les résultats du quatrième trimestre 2023 de Pfizer PFE ont été publiés, le géant américain a déclaré un bénéfice trimestriel ajusté de10 cents par action pour le trimestre clos en décembre, inférieur à celui du même trimestre de l’année précédente, aucours duquel la société avait déclaré un bénéfice par action de1,14 $.Ils ont dépassé les prévisions grâce à la faiblesse des dépenses liées à la recherche et développement. Pour faire baisser ses coûts, le groupe pharmaceutique américain souhaite au plus vite réduire son personnel.

Pfizer a mis en place un programme de réduction des coûts en raison de la baisse de la demande de son vaccin contre le COVID-19 et de son traitement antiviral, Paxlovid.  En 2023, selon Bloomberg, la société aurait enregistré une perte d’environ 40 milliards de dollars de valeur boursière. En réponse à cette situation, le géant américain a mis en place un programme de réduction des coûts.

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[Ukraine] Reportage exclusif sur l’affaire Ihor Hrynkevich, emblématique de la lutte anti-corruption de la présidence Zelensky

Alors que les campagnes de désinformation russes au sujet de l’Ukraine se multiplient, le gouvernement Zelensky intensifie sa lutte contre la corruption.

C’est l’un des points de propagande principaux du Kremlin pour démoraliser l’Occident d’envoyer de l’aide en Ukraine : le pays serait corrompu jusqu’à la moelle, et cette aide ne servirait qu’à engraisser certains dirigeants hauts-placés.

Ne faisons pas d’angélisme : la corruption (legs de l’URSS à tous les pays de la région) est présente en Ukraine, comme dans tout l’ex-bloc soviétique.

Cependant, le gouvernement de Volodymyr Zelensky a récemment prouvé qu’il faisait tout pour assainir son entourage. 

Dernier coup d’éclat en date : l’arrestation de l’homme d’affaires de Lviv Ihor Hrynkevych. Ce dernier a été pris dans un scandale de corruption incluant rien de moins que le ministère de la Défense, sur lequel les agents du SBU enquêtent discrètement, voire trop au goût de certains journalistes.

 

Du matériel défectueux

Le businessman est accusé d’avoir obtenu des contrats (au nombre de vingt-trois) avec le ministère de la Défense dont il n’a honoré qu’une partie, tout en étant payé pour la totalité. Pire encore, il aurait fourni pour ces commandes (des vêtements chauds destinés aux troupes cet hiver) des produits de mauvaise qualité, avant d’émarger encore plus, et de partager le gâteau avec ses commanditaires. Le préjudice pour l’armée se situe à plus d’un milliard et demi de hryvnias, soit près de 37 millions d’euros, auquel s’ajoute des retards dans la production et l’acheminement du matériel vers le front.

Apprenant qu’il était sous le coup d’une enquête, Ihor Hrynkevych aurait proposé un pot-de-vin de 500 000 dollars (près de vingt millions de hryvnias) pour étouffer l’affaire.

Une enquête, débutée après la saisie par les douanes ukrainiennes de vêtements destinés aux soldats et Trade Lines Retail LLC, Construction Company Citygrad LLC, et Construction Alliance Montazhproekt LLC, a déterminé qu’aucune de ces entreprises n’avaient les capacités de production, d’entrepôt pour répondre aux contrats du ministère. Sur les 23,6 n’ont pas été remplis, et 7 autres ne l’ont été qu’en partie. Huit autres ont été réglés sur des délais d’entre trois et cinq mois. Rien n’était aux normes.

D’après divers médias ukrainiens, Ihor Hrynkevych se serait ensuite procuré le numéro de téléphone personnel d’un chef-adjoint du SBU et l’aurait contacté sur Signal, expliquant avoir eu son numéro par « des amis communs », demandant une entrevue.

Rendez-vous est pris dans une station service de Kyiv, où Ihor Hrynkevych lui aurait demandé de l’aide pour récupérer les biens saisis par les douanes.

Pas fou, l’enquêteur aurait alors fait un rapport sur leur entrevue. Cependant, n’étant pas du genre à abandonner, le jour de Noël, l’homme d’affaires lui enverra « Le Christ est né, quand nous verrons-nous à nouveau ? », avant d’appeler. Ces tentatives resteront lettre morte. Finalement, un nouveau rendez-vous sera pris, toujours à cette station service, où Ihor Hrynkevych proposera cette fois-ci les 500 000 dollars de pot-de-vin, qu’il lui donnera le 29 décembre, provoquant son arrestation immédiate.

Jugé en pré-comparution, il sera envoyé en détention par le tribunal du district de Pechersk, à Kyiv, en attendant son procès.

Son fils, Roman Hrynkevych (titulaire d’une médaille présidentielle), était alors recherché, avant d’être arrêté à Odessa. Il a été placé en détention jusqu’au 17 mars dernier, suspecté avec cinq autres personnes d’avoir participé au complot de son père. Il nie avoir tenté de traverser la frontière avec la Moldavie, mais s’être trouvé à Odessa « pour affaires », selon des vidéos de son interrogatoire publiées sur des canaux Telegram. Le chef de l’un des départements du commandement des forces de soutien des forces armées ukrainiennes et le directeur d’un fournisseur ont été arrêtés en flagrant délit et placés en détention provisoire.

L’ancien vice-ministre de la Défense est notamment accusé d’avoir fait pression pour la conclusion de contrats pour la fourniture de biens matériels à prix gonflés, des commandes d’équipement de protections individuelles de qualité insuffisante avec un paiement anticipé de 100 %.

Pour l’heure, les actuels responsables des signatures d’appels d’offres effectués avec la famille Hrynkevych ne sont pas encore connus.

Services de sécurité de l’Ukraine SBU

Une famille d’oligarques

Intéressante famille que les Hrynkevych. La femme d’Ihor, Svitlana Hrynkevych, est la co-fondatrice de l’organisation caritative Hope.UA. Ancienne professeure à l’université polytechnique de Lviv, elle participe aussi aux affaires du clan. Elle et sa fille sont les co-fondatrices de Trade Lines Retail LLC, une des entreprises accusées de n’avoir pas rempli les contrats passés avec le ministère de la Défense. Elle est aussi propriétaire terrien : rien qu’en 2023, elle a fait l’acquisition de deux appartements dans le quartier de Pechersk, à Kyiv, pour une valeur totale de 35 millions de hryvnias, soit près de un million d’euros, ainsi que du motel Kateryna, situé près du stade Arena-Lviv, et d’un hectare et demi de terrain dans l’Oblast de Lviv.

Son fils Roman est l’autre fondateur de Hope.UA, et récipiendaire du prix du Cœur d’Or, remis par le président Zelensky. Il a aussi été mouillé dans plusieurs affaires louches, son entreprise, Construction Alliance Montazhproekt LLC, ayant elle aussi été accusée de s’être procurée des contrats de défense de façon malhonnête. 

Elle a en effet commencé à recevoir des contrats de construction dans l’Oblast de Jytomyr, où il se présentera aux élections locales en 2020. 

Cette entreprise est aussi accusée d’avoir détourné des fonds publics dans la construction d’un « centre pour la sécurité citoyenne », pour un contrat de 35 millions de hryvnias, soit une fois et demi les coûts estimés, selon les journalistes de Nashi Groshi. 

Lui aussi propriétaire terrien, Roman Hrynkevych s’est offert en 2023 une maison dans le cossu village de Kozyn, dans l’Oblast de Kyiv, pour la coquette somme de 50 millions de hryvnias (plus d’un million deux cent mille euros), ainsi que, le même jour, de quatre terrains dans ledit village.

D’après l’enquête du SBU, la famille Hrynkevych posséderait en tout dix-sept appartements et maisons, sept propriétés non-résidentielles, et dix-huit terrains.

« J’ai demandé de présenter les développements nécessaires pour que toutes les difficultés entre les représentants du gouvernement, les entreprises et les forces de l’ordre soient éliminées », a pour sa part déclaré le président, Volodymyr Zelensky.

De son côté, le directeur du SBU affirme que « l’enquête n’est pas terminée ». 

Ihor Hrynkevych risque entre 4 et 8 années d’emprisonnement au titre de l’article 369, partie 3, du Code pénal ukrainien. Les biens de sa famille ont été saisis, et tous les contrats d’entreprises qui lui sont affiliés ont été résiliés par le gouvernement, excepté un, pour l’acheminement de nourriture aux militaires des Oblasts de Kherson et Mykolaiv. 

 

La lutte continue

Mais cette affaire, aussi emblématique soit-elle, n’est pas la seule ! Rien que cette semaine, le SBU a opéré une fouille auprès des responsables du ministère de la Défense et des dirigeants de l’arsenal de Lviv, soupçonnés d’avoir détourné près de un milliard et demi de hryvnias destinés à l’achat d’obus. Parmi les personnes impliquées Olekansdr Liev, on retrouve notamment l’ancien chef du département de politique militaro-technique de développement d’armes et d’équipements militaires du ministère de la Défense, mais aussi l’actuel chef de ce département, Toomas Nakhur, ainsi que Yuriy Zbitnev, chef de l’arsenal de Lviv.

Toujours cette semaine, la NAKC (la brigade anti-corruption), a découvert que le chef du département anti-drogue de Kyiv disposait d’actifs non-prouvés d’une valeur de près de 3,9 millions de hryvnias (près de 100 000 euros).

Cependant, chez les journalistes ukrainiens, la même question revient toujours : par qui seront-ils remplacés ?

Si Kyiv envoie des signaux forts, il ne reste plus qu’à espérer que cette lutte soit suivie d’effets.

Source : Державне бюро розслідувань (Services de renseignements ukrainiens)

China ignores US entreaties of mediation

Par : AHH

Lavrov: “They believe that for 500 years they have ruled the world as they wish, living at the expense of others, and they think this should continue…”


by Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar at Indian Punchline

There is an old proverb that when misfortunes come, they come in battalions. Coming on top of reports of American soldiers going down like nine-pins on a drone strike against the super secret CIA station for intelligence and covert operations on the Syrian-Jordanian border, ’nyet’ is the word from Beijing to the Biden administration’s entreaties seeking  intervention with Tehran to rein in the Houthis of Yemen, against the foreboding backdrop of the Axis of Resistance expanding its operations against American and Israeli interests. 

President Biden deputed his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to handle this highly delicate mission with Beijing, instead of the US’s top diplomat Antony Blinken. Sullivan is uniquely placed to switch roles between the US’ domestic and foreign policies. He is a trusted hatchet man of the president and is actively involved in Biden’s re-election campaign. 

Sullivan stayed overnight in Thailand On Friday/Saturday to launch his charm offensive vis-a-vis Foreign Minister Wang Yi. But he came away with no sign that China is willing to use its influence with Tehran. 

Later, an unattributable media briefing by a senior NSC official via teleconference was hastily arranged by the White House to cover Sullivan’s back side. It brought home that reading the Chinese tea leaves is an art in itself. As the NSC official put it, “Beijing says they are raising this with the Iranians … but we’re certainly going to wait before we comment further on how effectively we think they’re actually raising it.” 

Sullivan seems to have hit a brick wall. This is curious because the Biden Administration should have learnt from previous experience with Beijing in trying to prod China to convince close ally North Korea to scale back its nuclear weapons programme or roll back its “no limits” friendship with Russia over Ukraine. 

Actually, South Korea’s military said on Sunday that North Korea fired several cruise missiles, extending a streak in weapons tests that are worsening tensions with the US and reflecting Pyongyang’s efforts to expand its arsenal of weapons designed to overwhelm remote US targets in the Pacific, including Guam!   

Evidently, the Biden administration failed to comprehend that Beijing was under no obligation to use its influence on Pyongyang for serving American interests. It is sheer naïveté to expect Beijing to fall for selective engagement on issues that aim to buy time for the president to give his best shot in the upcoming November elections. 

What does China get in return? The question doesn’t occur to the Biden Administration. The assumption in DC is that China is on an ego trip and begging for selective engagement with the No 1 military and economic power on the planet. On the contrary, China too has some legitimate demands to make — such as, for instance, the US not inciting Taiwan surreptitiously to travel on the path of independence, or allowing China a level playing field for setting new technology standards at the global level as an innovative country.

Interestingly, compared to the taciturn readout by the White House on the Sullivan-Wang Yi meeting in Thailand, the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a candid full-bodied statement on Saturday to set the record straight and pre-empt the spin doctors in the Biden White House from scripting some false narrative. The relevant excerpts from the Chinese statement titled  Wang Yi held a meeting with Sullivan, assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs are reproduced below: 

(Unofficial translation)

“The two sides conducted frank, substantive and fruitful strategic communications around the implementation of the consensus of the San Francisco meeting between the heads of state of the two countries and the proper handling of important and sensitive issues in Sino-US relations.

“Wang Yi said that this year marks the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States.The two sides should take this as an opportunity to summarise their experiences and learn lessons, treat each other equally rather than condescendingly, seek common ground while preserving differences rather than highlighting differences, effectively respect rather than harm each other’s core interests, and work together to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation to build a correct way for China and the United States to get along.

“Wang Yi emphasised that the Taiwan issue is China’s internal affairs, and Taiwan’s regional elections cannot change the basic fact that Taiwan is a part of China.The biggest risk to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is “Taiwan independence”, and the biggest challenge to Sino-US relations is also “Taiwan independence”.The United States must abide by the one-China principle and the three joint communiqués between China and the United States, implement the commitment not to support “Taiwan independence” into actions, and support China’s peaceful reunification.

“ Wang Yi pointed out that all countries have national security concerns, but they must be justified and reasonable. They cannot engage in pan-politicisation and pan-security, let alone curb and suppress the development of other countries.The two sides agreed to further discuss the boundary between national security and economic activities…

“The two sides also discussed international and regional issues such as the Middle East, Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula, and the South China Sea.” 


The Chinese readout did not even make any specific mention of the Houthis or Tehran! Instead, it underscored the perceived threat of Taiwan independence as “the biggest challenge to China—US relations.” And, furthermore, it reiterated Beijing’s concerns that the US is using export restrictions “to contain and suppress the development of other countries” and said that the two countries will discuss “the boundary between national security and economic activities” in future meetings.

What do we make out of this? Simply put, China’s reluctance to use its diplomatic and economic heft to support US moves to address the Red Sea disruptions by reining in the Axis of Resistance (or restrain North Korea’s behaviour) underscores the limitations of the Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach efforts or charm offensive to win over Beijing and get it committed to a selective engagement over Washington’s priorities on flash points that might otherwise become raging controversies in electoral politics till November. 

By the way, the Chinese readout also acknowledged that there are areas where Beijing is indeed interested in an engagement with the US at this transformative point in time — viz., the joint implementation of the so-called “San Francisco Vision,” which translates as: 

  • regular contacts between the two presidents so as to “give strategic guidance to bilateral relations”; 
  • promotion of bilateral exchanges; 
  • making good use of the current strategic communication channels and a series of dialogue and consultation mechanisms” in various fields ranging from diplomacy, mil-to-mil ties, economy, finance, commerce, climate change, etc.; 
  • continuing the discussion over the “guiding principles” of Sino-US relations; 
  • cooperation in drug control; 
  • Artificial intelligence intergovernmental dialogue mechanism; and,
  • cultural exchanges.

How come the US and its western allies get it all horribly wrong? For an answer, the final word must go to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who said in New York while on a brief visit to the UN hqs last weekend:

“They believe that for 500 years they have ruled the world as they wish, living at the expense of others, and they think this should continue. This logic completely ignores the objective reality, in particular the fact that the vast majority of former colonies have gained independence, become aware of their national interests, want to strengthen their national, cultural and religious identity and are growing so fast that they have left the West behind – at least the BRICS members are.”

The bottom line is, Beijing will not fall for US attempts to create misperceptions in China’s relations with Iran or North Korea. China has no intentions to help the US to pull its chestnuts out of the fire in West Asia or the Far East. The international environment is rather fraught and Beijing has set its compass to be on the right side of history.

Karaganov: Lowering the Nuclear Threshold

Par : AHH

Lowering the Nuclear Threshold? – Sergey Karaganov, Alexander Mercouris, and Glenn Diesen

Many practical steps have been taken by the West to lower the nuclear threshold. US tactical weapons are due to return to the same Britain which has already deployed nearly every weapon in its arsenal against Russia in the Ukraine! Their ability to discharge these plans or be effective is another matter, but the madmen continue to march into the Abyss, flouting common sense, the Russian nuclear doctrine (treating deployment of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons against them as equivalent) and even basic self-preservation. It is, to mirror the Ukies’ current “operations” against civilians and civilian infrastructure within Russia, to speak plainly — nuclear terrorism.

≈≈

The Americans and the British are lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons: about the reasons

According to media reports, the United States intends to deploy its tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) and their delivery systems on the territory of the United Kingdom. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation has already reacted rather nervously to this information, since this event is another evidence of the Anglo-Saxons’ readiness to actually use a nuclear arsenal in order, as in World War II, to put a bullet in the Third, completing it on their own terms.

NW

It should be noted that Great Britain itself has long been an official member of the “nuclear club.” This country is the third in the world to test nuclear weapons of its own design, right after the USA and the USSR. Britain’s first nuclear explosive device was so bulky that it had to be installed on board an anchored frigate. Naturally, London chose not its own coast for testing, but the western tip of distant Australia, namely in the area of ​​the Monte Bell Islands. The power of the nuclear explosion was about 25 kilotons.

The location in the immediate vicinity of the coast was not chosen by chance, since the British considered the USSR as a potential enemy and feared that the insidious Russians could themselves deliver nuclear explosive devices to British ports on civilian ships and detonate them there. You have to come up with something like this! Be that as it may, in London they really wanted to assess what effect the detonation of such special ammunition near the coast would have. The tests were successful, which gave Prime Minister Winston Churchill grounds to declare that Great Britain had become the owner of nuclear weapons. However, by this time the USA and the USSR already had thermonuclear bombs, and the British had to quickly catch up with them. Note that Australia and its desert territories were again used as a testing ground.

London’s lag behind Washington and Moscow was due to a number of objective circumstances. The difficult Second World War, which Great Britain went through from bell to bell, played a role. Work on a nuclear bomb there began back in 1940, in 1943 the British joined forces with the Americans, but the 1946 atomic energy law (McMahon Act), adopted in the United States, also limited their access to information about advanced nuclear technologies.

The more interesting is the current state of affairs. Currently, the United Kingdom exclusively possesses strategic nuclear weapons (NSW), which ensure its national security and the ability to add fuel to the fire of other people’s conflicts with impunity. British nuclear weapons are actually American.

These are the fourth-generation Trident II three-stage ballistic missiles designed to be launched from nuclear submarines. They make up 52% ​​of the strategic nuclear forces of the United States and 100% of the British. Only four strategic submarines of the Vanguard class are used as carriers, one of which is constantly on combat duty. This should be remembered by those who, in the comments, call on the Kremlin to hit London with a “vigorous bomb”.

It’s not a problem to strike, but in response, ballistic missiles will fly at Russian megacities from somewhere under the water. The only Vanguard class SSBN can fire 8 missiles carrying a total of up to 40 thermonuclear warheads.

Application threshold

The UK’s nuclear arsenal is believed to number 225, of which 160 are ready for use. It is obvious that strategic nuclear forces are a weapon of strategic deterrence, which is necessary in order to have, but never use. However, the Anglo-Saxons are openly preparing to use nuclear arsenals for the second time in human history.

Thus, back in the relatively calm year of 2020, the Americans created a low-power nuclear warhead W76-2 for underwater-based Trident II missiles. Their power is something like 5 kilotons, which is 5 times less than that of the first British special ammunition, tested back in 1952 off the coast of Australia. Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Sergei Ryabkov then stated with concern the following, verbatim:

The appearance of low-power charges on US strategic carriers means that the discussions previously voiced in declarative form on the American side about the possibility of using such weapons in a hypothetical conflict are already being embodied in metal, in products. This is a reflection of the fact that the United States is actually lowering the nuclear threshold, that it is allowing itself to wage a limited nuclear war and win such a war.

And now the Americans are preparing to place tactical nuclear weapons in Great Britain, which the British do not currently have at all. Based on an analysis of the draft budget of the US Air Force, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS, Federation of American Scientists) came to the conclusion that the Pentagon intends to return tactical nuclear weapons to the territory of Foggy Albion. It will be located in a storage facility at Lakenheath airbase, 100 km northeast of London:

Due to the arrival of airmen, driven by the launch of the Surety mission and the deployment of two F-35 squadrons, RAF Lakenheath is experiencing a significant shortage of housing available to pilots at the E-4 level and below.

Apparently, we are talking about the newest version of the B61-12 aerial bombs, which will be carried by the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-35A Lightning II fighters. Uncle Sam defiantly loads and hangs the gun on the wall. In whose direction should it then shoot?

Author: Sergey Marzhetsky


and this came out just yesterday on RT:

US to redeploy nuclear weapons to UK – Telegraph

The United States is planning to deploy nuclear weapons to the UK for the first time in 15 years, The Telegraph reported Friday, citing Pentagon documents.

The report comes amid heightened tensions between NATO and Russia over the Ukraine conflict, and calls from some Western politicians to prepare for a potential armed clash with Moscow.

The British newspaper cited procurement contracts for a new facility at the Royal Air Force station at Lakenheath in Suffolk, which point to Washington’s intention to bring nuclear weapons to the base. RAF Lakenheath is expected to house B61-12 bombs that are three times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the Telegraph said. The US sent F-35 nuclear-capable fighters to the base last year.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last year that Moscow would be compelled to enact “compensatory countermeasures” if American nuclear warheads were to return to Britain. Russia has accused the West of stoking tensions in Europe and maintains that the eastward expansion of NATO is one of the root causes of the Ukraine conflict.

High-ranking European officials, including German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, have spoken of the need to brace for a potential war with Russia. Last week the chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, urged the bloc to be “readier across the whole spectrum” for direct confrontation.

The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, dismissed the claims that Moscow was planning an offensive against NATO as “information warfare” aimed at justifying “hybrid aggression.”

Comment l’«asabiyya» du Yémen remodèle la géopolitique

par Pepe Escobar. Les Houthis ont compris que plus ils attirent les Américains dans le marécage géopolitique de l’Asie occidentale, plus ils sont en mesure d’infliger de graves douleurs à l’économie mondiale.

Yemeni ‘Asabiyyah Reshapes Geopolitics

Par : AHH

To invoke Chinese wisdom, picture a single rock changing the course of a stream, which then changes the course of a mighty river.

by Pepe Escobar at The Cradle

“When there is a general change of conditions,
It is as if the entire creation had changed
and the whole world been altered,
as if it were a new and repeated creation,
a world brought into existence anew.”
— Ibn Khaldun

Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance forces have made it very clear, right from the start, that they set up a blockade in the Bab el-Mandeb and the southern Red Sea only against Israeli-owned or destined shipping vessels. Their single objective was and remains to stop the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli biblical psychopathy.

As a response to a morally-based call to end a human genocide, the United States, masters of the Global War Of Terror (italics mine), predictably re-designated Yemen’s Houthis as a “terrorist organization,” launched a serial bombardment of underground Ansarallah military installations (assuming US intel know where they are), and cobbled together a mini-coalition of the willing that includes its UK, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, and Bahraini vassals.

Without missing a beat, Yemen’s Parliament declared the US and UK governments “Global Terrorist Networks.”

Now let’s talk strategy.

With a single move, the Yemeni resistance seized the strategic advantage by de facto controlling a key geoeconomic bottleneck: the Bab el-Mandeb. Hence, they can inflict serious trouble on sectors of global supply chains, trade, and finance.

And Ansarallah has the potential to double down — if need be. Persian Gulf traders, off the record, have confirmed insistent chatter that Yemen may consider imposing a so-called Al-Aqsa Triangle — aptly named after the 7 October Palestinian resistance operation aimed at destroying the Israeli military’s Gaza Division and taking captives as leverage in a sweeping prisoner swap deal.

Such a move would mean selectively blocking not only the Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea route to the Suez Canal, but also the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off oil and gas deliveries to Israel from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – although the top oil suppliers to Israel are in fact Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

These Yemenis are afraid of nothing. Were they able to impose the triangle – in this case only with direct Iranian involvement — that would represent the US-assassinated Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani’s Grand Design on cosmic steroids. This plan holds the realistic potential of finally bringing down the pyramid of hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives — and consequently, the whole western financial system.

And yet, even as Yemen controls the Red Sea and Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, Al-Aqsa Triangle remains just a working hypothesis.

Welcome to the Hegemon’s blockade

With a simple, clear strategy, the Houthis perfectly understood that the deeper they draw the strategy-deprived Americans into the West Asian geopolitical swamp, in a sort of “undeclared war” mode, the more they’re able to inflict serious pain on the global economy, which the Global South will blame on the Hegemon.

Today, Red Sea shipping traffic has plunged in half, compared to the summer of 2023; supply chains are wobbly; ships carrying food are forced to circumnavigate Africa (and risk delivering cargo after its expiry date); predictably, inflation across the vast EU agricultural sphere (worth €70 billion) is rising fast.

Yet, never underestimate a cornered Empire.

Western-based insurance giants perfectly understood the rules of Ansarallah’s limited blockade: Russian and Chinese ships, for instance, have free passage in the Red Sea. Global insurers have only refused to cover US, UK, and Israeli ships — exactly as the Yemenis intended.

So the US, predictably, changed the narrative into a big, fat lie: ‘Ansarallah is attacking the whole global economy.’

Washington turbo-charged sanctions (not a big deal as the Yemeni resistance uses Islamic financing); increased the bombing, and in the name of sacrosanct “freedom of navigation” – always applied selectively — placed its bets on the “international community,” including leaders of the Global South, begging for mercy, as in please keep the shipping lanes open. The goal of the new, reframed American deceit is to elbow the Global South into ditching its support for Ansarallah’s strategy.

Pay attention to this crucial US sleight of hand: Because, from now on, in a new perverse twist of Operation Genocide Protection, it is Washington that will be blockading the Red Sea for the entire world. Washington itself, mind you, will be spared: US shipping depends on Pacific trade routes, not West Asian ones. This will ratchet up the pain on Asian customers and especially on Europe’s economy – which already took the heavies blows from Ukraine-associated Russian energy sanctions.

As Michael Hudson has interpreted it,  there is a strong possibility that the neocons in charge of US foreign policy actually want (italics mine) to have Yemen and Iran implement the Al-Aqsa Triangle: “It will be the main energy buyers in Asia, China, and other countries that are going to be hurt. And that (…) will give the United States even more power to control the oil supply of the world as a bargaining chip in trying to renegotiate this new international order.”

That, in fact, is the classic Empire of Chaos modus operandi.


Calling attention to “our people in Gaza”

There is no solid evidence the Pentagon has the slightest clue about what its Tomahawks are hitting in Yemen. Even several hundred missiles won’t change a thing. Ansarallah, which has already endured eight years of nonstop US-UK-Saudi-Emirati firepower — and basically won — will not relent today over a few missile strikes.

Even the proverbial “unnamed officials” informed the New York Times that “locating the Houthi targets has proven more difficult than expected,” essentially because of lousy US intel on Yemeni “air defense, command centers, ammunition depots, and drone and missile storage and production facilities.”

It’s quite enlightening to listen to how Yemeni Prime Minister Abdulaziz bin Saleh Habtoor frames Ansarallah’s Israel-blockade initiative decision as “based on humanitarian, religious and moral aspects”. He refers, crucially, to “our people in Gaza.” And the overall vision, he reminds us, “stems from the vision of the Axis of Resistance.”

It is a reference smart onlookers will recognize as General Soleimani’s ever-lasting legacy.

With a keen historical sense — from the creation of Israel to the Suez crisis and the Vietnam war — the Yemeni prime minister recalls how “Alexander the Great reached the shores of Aden and Socotra island but was defeated (…) Invaders tried to occupy the capital of the historical state of Shebah and failed (…) How many countries throughout history have tried to occupy the west coast of Yemen and failed? Including Britain.”

It’s absolutely impossible for the west and even the Global Majority to understand the Yemeni mindset without learning a few facts from the Angel of History.

So let’s go back to the 14th century universal history master Ibn Khaldun — the author of The Muqaddimah.


Ibn Khaldun cracks the Ansarallah Code

Ibn Khaldun’s family was a contemporary to the rise of the Arab Empire, on the move alongside the first armies of Islam in the 7th century, from the austere beauty of the Hadramawti valleys in what is now southern Yemen all the way to the Euphrates.

Ibn Khaldun, crucially, was a precursor of Kant, who offered the brilliant insight that “geography lies at the basis of history.” And he read the 12th century Andalusian philosophy master Averroes – as well as other writers exposed to Plato’s works and understood how the latter referred to the moral strength of “the first people” in the Timaeus, in 360 B.C.

Yes, this boils down to “moral strength” — for the west, a mere soundbite; for the east, an essential philosophy. Ibn Khaldun grasped how civilization began and was constantly renewed by people with natural goodness and energy; people who understood and respected the natural world, who lived light, united by blood or brought together by a shared revolutionary idea or religious drive.

Ibn Khaldun defined as asabiyya this force that binds people together.

Like so many words in Arabic, asabiyya exhibits a range of diverse, loosely connected meanings. Arguably, the most relevant is esprit de corps, team spirit, and tribal solidarity – just as Ansarallah exhibits.

As Ibn Khaldun demonstrates, when the power of asabiyya is fully harnessed, reaching way beyond the tribe, it becomes more powerful than the sum of its individual parts, and can become a catalyst to reshape history; to make or break Empires; to encourage civilizations; or force them to collapse.

We are definitely living an asabiyya moment, brought about by the Yemeni resistance’s moral strength.


Solid as a rock

Ansarallah innately understood the threat of eschatological Zionism — which happens to mirror the Christian Crusades a millennium ago. And they are virtually the only ones, in practical terms, trying to stop it.

Now, as an extra bonus, they are exposing the plutocratic Hegemon, once again, as bombers of Yemen, the poorest Arab nation-state, where at least half the population remains “food-insecure.”

But Ansarallah is not heavy-weapons-free like the Pashtun mujahideen who humiliated NATO in Afghanistan.

Their anti-ship cruise missiles include the Sayyad and the Quds Z-O (range up to 800 km) and the Al Mandab 2 (range up to 300 km).

Their anti-ship ballistic missiles include the Tankil (range of up to 500 km); the Asef (range of up to 450 km); and the Al-Bahr Al-Ahmar (range of up to 200 km). That covers the southern part of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but not, for instance, the islands of the Socotra archipelago.

Accounting for roughly one-third of the country’s population, Yemen’s Houthis, who form the backbone of the Ansarallah resistance, do have their own internal agenda: gaining fair representation in governance (they launched Yemen’s Arab Spring); protecting their Zaydi (neither Shia nor Sunni) faith; fighting for the autonomy of the Saada governorate; and working for the revival of the Zaydi Imamate, which was up and running before the 1962 revolution.

Now, they are making their mark on The Big Picture. It’s no wonder Ansarallah fiercely fights the Hegemon’s vassal Arabs – especially those who signed a deal to normalize relations with Israel under the Trump administration.

The Saudi-Emirati war on Yemen, with the Hegemon “leading from behind,” was a quagmire that cost Riyadh at least $6 billion a month for seven years. It ended with a wobbly 2022 truce in a de facto Ansarallah victory. A signed peace agreement, it should be noted, has been disallowed by the US, despite Saudi efforts to seal a deal.

Now, Ansarallah is turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside down with not just a few missiles and drones but also oceans of craftiness and strategic acumen. To invoke Chinese wisdom, picture a single rock changing the course of a stream, which then changes the course of a mighty river.

Epigones of Diogenes can always remark, half in jest, that the Russia-China-Iran strategic partnership may have contributed with their own well-placed rocks in this path to a more equitable order. That’s the beauty of it: we may not be able to see these rocks, only the effects they cause. What we do see, though, is the Yemeni resistance, solid as a rock.

The record shows the Hegemon, once again, reverting to auto-pilot mode: Bomb, Bomb, Bomb. And in this particular case, to bomb is to redirect the narrative from a genocide committed in real time by Israel, the Empire’s aircraft carrier in West Asia.

Still, Ansarallah can always increase the pressure by sticking firmly to its narrative and, driven by the power of asabiyya, deliver to the Hegemon a second Afghanistan, compared to which Iraq and Syria will look like a weekend at Disneyland.

Carl Zha: How to Safely Travel the Red Sea

Par : AHH

Joining us today is @CarlZha , a Chinese-born political commentator and the host of the “Silk And Steel Podcast.” We’ll be delving into Zelensky getting shut down by China at Davos, the Taiwan Elections, and exploring safe methods for traversing the Red Sea.

He discusses at length:

  1. The backstory of the Al-CIAda outfit from Xinjiang, China, called East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). It has since morphed into new names, as usually done by USUK’s kosher proxies. This ETIM is planted in Syria’s Idleb, among worst terrorists on earth, and brought their families to live with them with some total 10-20,000 (!) They serve as proxies in every imperial front, including 404. Iran missiled them last week, even though some 1,200 km away; there was evidence of their association with terrorism and mass atrocity within Iran over the years.
  2. China’s consistent policy towards Palestine. It only acknowledged Israel in early 1990s! It was forced to acknowledge the existence of Israel due to compradore PLO’s own betrayal and acknowledgment of zionism during the Oslo process. The ongoing rigamarole over the dead-on-arrival “two state solution” lingers precisely because of this great betrayal by the compradore Palestinians back then, followed by Saudis in 2002 which obtained written guarantees from all official arabs of normalization in return for a Palestinian state and peace. This was rejected by Sharon back then, and Netanyahoo today.

Even Lavrov was forced to use the Palestinian Authority as official face of Palestine at the UN, despite being discredited and reviled by Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza in most recent polls, since the PLO remains the only consensual modus vivendi to enforce an urgent permanent ceasefire. Yet both Hamas and the Zionists are dead set against coexistence (and do you blame Palestinians after the frank unrepentant satanism they face??). The forms must be observed, including this two-state offer by the arabs, guaranteed to be rejected by the combined West through their zionist proxy, further exposing them. This will serve as the equivalent of the Russian Ultimatum of December 2021, with a subsequent free hand given to the Resistance Axis to enforce peace. Organized by the same Russians at the UN and through the Saudis and OIC! Priceless

USUK Seeks Wider War with Iran via Yemen

Par : AHH

US-British Strikes on Yemen Seek to Provoke Wider War with Iran
🔹US-British strikes on Yemen have predictably only escalated regional tensions;
🔹Yemen has been targeted for years not only by US-British backed Saudi air and missile strikes, but also a multi-year, Saudi-led ground invasion, neither of which impacted Ansar Allah’s military capabilities;
🔹US-British strikes on Yemen have only made passage through the Red Sea more dangerous, delaying by many months the possibility of commercial shipping returning to the route;
🔹US policy papers have laid out the ultimate objective for the region is removing Iran as a competitor through regime change using covert action within Iran while undermining Iranian allies across the region;
🔹Rather than attempting to de-escalate and stabilize the region, it is clear the US is determined to do exactly the opposite, ultimately hoping to draw Iran into a direct confrontation;

Follow The New Atlas on Telegram: https://t.me/brianlovethailand

Galloway interviews Ansar Allah’s Al-Bukhaiti

Par : AHH

George Galloway interviews Muhammed Al-Bukhaiti of Yemen’s Ansar Allah (Houthi) Political Bureau, and Governor of the Dhamar Governorate, an area bombed recently by the United States and Britain.

La Shoah, au cœur du génocide de Gaza

par Pierre Simon. Jamais dans l'histoire de l'humanité une race de gens n'est passée aussi rapidement du statut de victime exceptionnelle à celui de meurtrier exceptionnel, sous prétexte de recréer son pays d’origine.

Michael Hudson on Russia, Iran and the Red Sea: NATO’s War Economy Collapses

Par : AHH

Join us as the renowned economist discusses Russia’s new status as largest economy of Europe, the Red Sea economic crisis brewing and China’s forecasted collapse despite becoming the largest car producer in the world this year. All this and much much more!

In a new discussion with Danny Haiphong, Michael Hudson continues his analysis of why US policies aimed at hurting Russia, China, and Iran are damaging US allies, particularly Europe. That both shrinks US markets and the resource base the US has available were it to be so dumb as to act on its military escalation threat display.

HAIPHONG: Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the stream. It’s Danny Haiphong, your host. As you can see, I’m joined by the renowned economist and author, Professor Michael Hudson. You can find his website in the video description. Please do hit the like button as we begin. That helps boost this stream. And, of course, you can find not only Michael’s website, but all the ways you can support this channel in the video description. How are you doing today, Michael?

HUDSON: Pretty good. It’s snowing here in New York, so I’m pretty much snowed in.

HAIPHONG: Yep. Yes, yes, it is quite bad out there today. But I am glad to have you here because there’s a lot of economic news. But you emphasize, and this channel tries to emphasize, the relationship between geopolitics and economics, geopolitical economy, as you, Radhika [Desai], and Ben Norton, and other great journalists have attempted to do.

And so I wanted to start, then, let’s talk about Ukraine first. Let’s begin there. There’s all kinds of talks about there being a quote-unquote stalemate with regard to Ukraine.

However, the realities, especially economically and on the battlefield, are a lot different. So, Michael, I’m just going to let you go on what you would like to comment on with regard to Ukraine, because the situation is not as hot in the news, but there are massive changes happening in this conflict.

HUDSON: Well, it’s the United States that’s saying that it’s a stalemate in Ukraine. What they mean is that the Ukraine counter-offenses have been utterly ineffective. Ukraine has lost the war.

And there have been almost all of the discussions that you get, for instance, on Judge Napolitano’s interviews, and the European press, the Russian press, the Chinese press, they all say, Well, the war is over. Russia can just continue to take however much it wants, but there is no point in Russia trying to take more land right now because Ukraine, or rather Mr.

Zelensky, is sending all of the Ukrainians he can find, especially the Hungarian Ukrainians, the Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and the Romanian Ukrainians, in the fight to get killed.

So, maybe we can convince Russia, Don’t mop up, don’t lock in your victory. Why don’t we just say it’s a stalemate and leave things the way they are since you’re winning so strongly?

Well, obviously, Russia has already said, We’ve already given the terms for our peace. Of course, we can negotiate anytime. Our terms are simple, total surrender. We’re going to get rid of Nazism. We’re going to make sure that Ukraine will never join NATO. And we’re going to make sure that the Russian speakers and Crimea are part of Russia. So anytime you want to negotiate, meaning, say yes to our terms, we’ll be glad to. But meanwhile, we’re just going to sit here. And if you want to send more and more troops in, that’s fine.

Now, the Americans think that, okay, if Russia isn’t taking any more land, it’s a tie. But it’s really not a tie because if you read President Putin’s speeches and Foreign Secretary Lavrov’s speeches, he says, Well, Ukraine is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking about the big picture. The big picture is, for instance, that Russia on January 1st became the lead administrator of the BRICS+.

And the United States is meanwhile losing the fight all over the world. It’s losing the economic fight against Russia and China. Russia is increasing its industrial production, not only military, but in the production of aircraft, automobiles. China is growing and the United States is not. And most of all, Europe is going into a depression led by the collapse of, or I should say, the destruction of German industry as a result of the sanctions against Russia. And also the sanctions that the United States are insisting that Europe impose against China.

The United States has told Europe, you really can only trade with us and our NATO allies.

We want you to reduce your trade with China to what the head of the EU, Mr. Borrell, has said. He said, Well, you know, China, we import a lot more from you than we export. It’s got to be even. And China said, well, there are plenty of things we’d like to import from you, Europeans, such as the chip-making etching machinery for ultraviolet etching that’s made by Holland. And Borrell says, Oh, we can’t, the United States won’t let us send you, sell you anything that potentially is used in the military. And China says, well, anything that can be used economically can be military because the military is part of the economy.

So I guess we’re quite happy to agree with you and have balanced trade between China and Europe. We’ll just cut back our trade with you to maybe the $100 a year trade that you have to trade with us.

So Europe is voluntarily isolating, limiting its trade and investment to the United States, cutting off the trade with Russia. And without Russian gas and oil, you’re going to have the German, French, and Italian manufacturing industry, chemical industry, fertilizer industry, and agriculture continue to shrink.

And so the stalemate that America is talking about really means we’re shrinking our allies in Europe. We’re losing the third world. And what is happening in Ukraine, fighting to the last Ukrainian, now looks like a similar fight in the Near East, where it looks like there’s a similar stalemate, which really has been inflaming the world’s global majority and the global South into thinking that all of a sudden this is something awful. I’ll get to that later.

But the important thing is that I think the Americans have already realized that they’re going to lose the war in Ukraine. And the problem, as you read the New York Times and the Washington Post, and especially the Financial Times, is if we lose the war in Ukraine, how will Biden win the election in November? Because he’s been pushing, his whole policy is we can essentially wreck Russia. Our sanctions are going to lead to the collapse of Russian industry. The Russian people will get so upset with the war, there’s going to be a regime change. They’ll overthrow Mr. Putin and we can get another Boris Yeltsin in who is going to really wreck Russia in the way that our neoliberal advisors were able to wreck it in the 1990s.

Well, that hasn’t happened. So what’s going to happen? Well, the public relations people of the Democratic Party have got together and they’ve all decided, Okay, what we want to tell the people is, it really didn’t matter in Ukraine. It doesn’t matter because we don’t have to win in Ukraine because America can fight [with] a kind of soft power. And we have other ways of dominating the world and maintaining America number one, even though we’re de-industrializing our economy. Even though we’re the largest debtor in the world, we’re going to be able to dominate. And the new Democratic Party public relations push is what’s called “soft power”.

And in yesterday’s January 15th Financial Times, there was a long discussion. They had a whole page by a man who had been President Clinton’s advisor, National Intelligence Council advisor Joseph Nye. For a whole page. And it was Nye who coined the term soft power. A few decades ago, when he was arguing with Paul Kennedy, who was saying that the Americans were on the decline. And he came up with this idea to say, the United States can still be able to exert influence, but not of a military type, but of financial power, regime change.

And what he said, he gave five reasons why the United States would not necessarily be eclipsed by China or by Russia or by any other countries. And it’s hilarious to look at the five reasons that the Financial Times yesterday trotted forth for why there’s not going to be any threat to the United States.

The first reason he gave was geography and friendly neighbors. Well in the last few months, especially since the fighting and Israeli attacks on Gaza have occurred, America’s lost public opinion. And even Secretary Blinken has said that the fight in Israel is creating antagonism, not only against Israel, but America has lost its moral dominance as a result of backing the genocide and opposing any criticism of Israel within the United Nations. So it’s lost foreign support. There’s a growing anti-Americanism, not only in Asia, Africa, and the global South, but in Europe.

Well, the second reason that Nye cited was domestic energy supplies. America controls oil. Not only does it produce its own oil, but it’s just been able to block the rest of the world from importing Russian oil, and it’s been able to blow up Nord Stream. And now it’s pushing Israel to essentially act as another Ukraine. It’s pushing Israel to incite Lebanon and Iran into a provocation, into a military response to the Israeli attacks that is going to enable Israel to do what a Senate majority leader, the Republican leader, has been pushing for, and what Biden is pushing for, and what the neocons have been pushing for for 20 years, war with Iran to grab the oil reserves of what were Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. And if it can control the oil reserves of the Near East and be able to block off their energy exports to all the other countries, just as it’s been able to block Russia’s oil exports to Europe, then it can control the industrialization of other countries because industry basically runs on oil and gas. Industry is energy, and without energy, you’re not going to be able to have your own industrialization independently of the United States. So the U.S. foreign policy, as we’ve talked before, I think, in our last show, for 100 years, the United States has used oil as an attempt to control the world’s economy.

Well, the third point that Nye points out is the dollar-based financial system. Well, it’s amazing that he could say that in yesterday’s Financial Times when the whole world was trying to de-dollarize. You’re getting one speech after another, not only from Russia and from China, but from the global South countries. And even in the Near East, they’re saying now that America has grabbed Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, $300 billion, all of the money that we’ve saved in our domestic monetary reserves are subject to confiscation by the United States. And they’ve already told Saudi Arabia that if they do not keep their international reserves from oil exports in the form of United States stocks and bonds, that would be treated as an act of war. So here in the Near East, you’re having Saudi Arabia and Bahrain under increasing pressure to support the Arabs being attacked by Israel, and yet they’re afraid to act because the United States is holding their dollars hostage. Well, very quickly, you’re seeing other countries move out of dollars as quickly as they can.

And finally, the fifth argument that Nye points out for why America cannot lose is demo-graphic and technological leadership. But that’s the one fatal Achilles heel of the United States economy. Its hope, its idea of technological leadership is to get monopoly power over information technology, pharmaceuticals, and other areas that it can dominate for intellec-tual property through copyrighting and through essentially suing countries that will adopt the technology that’s developed in the United States.

Prof. Hudson steps away for a minute.

HAIPHONG: That summary, Joseph Nye outlined it, and Professor Hudson broke it down, broke down the facade, or the reality behind the facade that the neocons spread. And what’s so interesting about this piece is that, I mean, Joseph Nye, I mean, he is a Carter and then Clinton functionary, someone who served as an Undersecretary of State and Undersecretary of Defense for these administrations. And he is someone who actually has been considered less hawkish, but if we went through this article, you would see that what he is arguing with regard to soft power is actually regime change by other means.

And that regime change is heavily connected to the economic realm, as perhaps Professor Hudson outlined so eloquently. There is so many connections to be made. We have a lot of them I’m going to raise with Professor Hudson, including on Russia, Russia being now the biggest economy in Europe by purchasing power parity terms.

Also, the China collapse theory. There’s new news. There’s recent news about China actually surpassing Japan and leading the world now in car manufacturing and how its electric vehicle production is causing so much alarm.

Prof. Hudson returns

I wanted to now ask you about a development, given all that you outlined with regard to Joseph Nye’s assessment and analysis on soft power in the US’s so-called advantages. I wanted to talk to you about this story here. Vladimir Putin was just meeting with business leaders in the Far East, and he made a claim about Russia now being the biggest economy in Europe by purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, becoming Europe’s first economy, despite pressure from all sides.

And here’s what he said. He said, It seems that we are being strangled and pressured from every side, but still we are the largest economy in Europe. We left Germany behind and climbed into fifth in the world. China, the U.S., India, Japan and Russia. We are number one in Europe. And so there’s reports in that conversation with business leaders from the region that Russia is set to grow three percent year on year, and it’s likely to be even higher, maybe four and five percent.

Now, there’s also the news, you brought it up, but there is a huge stagnation going on in Europe. In an analysis also in Financial Times, there are 48 economists that talked about the eurozone set for weak growth this coming year. And the prediction was across these economists, zero point six percent on average, with many indicating less than that. And of course, some indicating more. But the vast majority said it was going to be less than half of one percent. So, Michael, your thoughts. How did this, how did this happen? And perhaps you can explain the economic intricacies on how this happened.

HUDSON: Well, we’ve discussed in the past how it happened. The United States, starting with President Clinton and actually with President Carter, decided to help American firms make higher profits by moving their labor force out of the United States, by trying to shift manufacturing first to Mexico, along the maquiladoras  under Carter, and then under Clinton to China and Asia.

And the idea was to create increasing industrial unemployment in the United States to prevent labor’s wages from rising. And the theory that has guided the Democratic Party’s economists is, if you can cut wages, there will be higher profits and higher profits will lead to more prosperity.

Well, the reality is that you cut wages by moving your industry outside of the country, by de-industrializing. And that is still the policy that America has taken. And it has replaced industrialization with financialization to make money financially, hoping that the companies that have now moved out towards China and Asia and other countries are going to be able to have higher profits and essentially become more prosperous for the donor class to the Democratic and also the Republican parties.

But what President Putin was talking about was something much more. Russia already, along with China, have begun to produce their own airplanes. Take a look at the last week’s news, all about Boeing, yet again, having other accidents on its airplanes. Boeing used to be a technological leader in aircraft, but then it was merged with McDonnell Douglas and became a financial company. So it broke up the Boeing system of making airplanes and began to outsource to various other companies, all the little parts. And all Boeing is now is assembling diverse parts that it buys from various suppliers, very much like television sets are made. You buy different parts from different suppliers.

Well, the reason Putin is making his speech in the Near East is Russia and China are working together for an enormous industrial development to take place in eastern Siberia, which has been obviously underpopulated because of the bad weather for many centuries now, but also is now beginning to warm up. And the idea is to integrate Chinese industry and Russian industry and technology and to design entire cities that are going to be technological complexes producing all sorts of interrelated parts together, computer parts, airplanes, trains, automobiles. China is already the largest automobile exporter in the world. And so you’re going to have this whole new center of industrial growth in eastern Asia.

Well, the idea is that this is going to be a great increase in prosperity. And the way in which these cities are developing, when I first went to Russia in 1994, I stayed at the home of the professor who had designed Togliatti City, the city where they were going to begin producing automobiles designed by the Italians. And he explained how he designed the whole city together to combine the factories and production to workers’ housing, to workers’ entertainment, to workers’ health, and all of the different forms of supplying materials and parts of cars all dovetailed together. Well, he was basically an industrial engineer. And that is how Russia and China are developing the cities that they’re creating along with universities, training systems in East Asia and Siberia.

So essentially, Putin is saying to the world, if you’re a global south country or an Arab country, and you want to have your economy grow and trade more, who are you going to tie your economy to? The world is being split into two parts, the US-NATO “garden” and the rest of the world, 85% jungle. The jungle is growing. The garden isn’t growing because its philosophy is not industrialization. Its philosophy is to make monopoly rents, meaning rents that you make in your sleep without producing value. You just have a privilege of a right to collect money on a monopoly technology that you have.

But China and Russia are way ahead of the United States in most of the growth technologies that we’re talking about, not yet in the ultraviolet etching of computer chips, but in many areas.

So you’re having the whole shift of technological advance move away from North America and the United States, where it was ever since World War I, to Russia and China.

How is the United States going to cope with the rest of the world industrializing and not needing any contact with the United States?

President Biden keeps saying China is our enemy. Ultimately, our military says we’re going to have war with China within two or three years. We’re at war with Russia right now in the Ukraine. That’s our objective, war.

But the rest of the world, essentially, its response is not a mirror image of this, is not to say, well, we can go to war. We’re going to have Russia fighting Europe.

Just in the last few days, you had numerous American military magazines and especially European spokesmen saying, if we lose in Ukraine, Russia is going to march right through Poland and Romania, right to retake Germany. It’s going to conquer Europe, and maybe it won’t even stop in England.

Well, that’s just nonsense. The reality is that Russia and China don’t need Europe anymore.

They don’t need the United States. Whereas under the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright said, America is the unique country. It’s the necessary country.

The fact is that the rest of the world not only finds America unnecessary, but America and its NATO allies to be the major threat to their own prosperity. So they’re essentially splitting into their own world. And the BRICS group is expanding its trade relations, its investment relations, and especially its financial clearing and monetary operations to be independent of the dollar, de-dollarizing, and certainly independent of the euro, which seems to have no visible means of support right now, and going their own way.

Now, that is exactly what has led the United States to push Israel [essentially] to follow Netanyahu’s belligerence, because the United States says, We realize we’re losing power.

We know that it’s really not a stalemate. We know that we’ve lost the chance for world dominance. We may be re-elected by telling people, you know, it doesn’t really matter.

But we know that it does matter. The last chance we have to assert American power is military. And the main military prize is the Near East now, just as it was after 9-11, when Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld pressed for an invasion of Iraq to begin grabbing its soil and to essentially create America’s foreign legion in the form of ISIS and al-Qaeda Iraq. So now America has two armies that it’s using to fight in the Near East, the ISIS/al-Qaeda foreign legion (Arabic-speaking foreign legion) and the Israelis. The plan is—and America is willing to fight to the last Israeli, just as it’s willing—it’s trying to fight to the last Ukrainian in order to make this final grab of the Near East in fighting Iran.

This is a crazy idea, but it seems that that’s exactly what is being planned.

General Petraeus, who lost the war in Afghanistan, has said, we’ve got to conquer Iran. That’s going to be—we can regain all the power that we’ve lost by attacking Iran. And so now it looks like President Biden is hoping to make a political comeback by saying, Well, we may not have blocked Russia and Ukraine, but at least we’ve conquered the Near East.

But the way in which it’s conquering it [somehow has] become a catalyst to make the whole global majority, the whole rest of the world, especially Africa, South America, and South Asia, to think, Wait a minute, what’s happening in Israel and Palestine today is exactly what happened to us at our beginning.

In the United States, what did the Americans do? The White people came, the Anglo-Saxons and the other Europeans, and they killed 90% of the Indians, drove them out, isolated them, put them in basically concentration camps. And then when they found out that there was oil under these concentration camps, they essentially murdered the Indians there or drove them out to grab the oil.

Same thing in Latin America. When the Spaniards came to Latin America, they grabbed the land, drew up land grants, and these land grants created latifundia, which has been the great problem of Latin America for the last five centuries, because it’s prevented Latin America from growing their own food. It’s fought against the indigenous population feeding itself to turn the land into export crops, largely under World Bank guidance for all of this.

Same thing in Africa. They say, wait a minute, what is happening in Israel is what happened to us, with the colonizing powers. This is what Germany did in Africa. It’s what the Dutch did in South Africa. It’s Germany in Namibia, the Dutch in South Africa, the English through Africa, and especially the French in its territories. All of this has occurred before.

And all of a sudden, just as Americans go to the movies and mourn more for the Westerns, they’re cheering for the Indians against the cavalry. You’re having the rest of the world cheering for the underdog because the underdog is who they were. The underdog is them today.

And this idea is turning into a feeling of, Let’s throw off all of the barriers to colonialism.

Let’s start with French Africa, which we’re throwing off the French there. We’re not going to let French banks, French mineral companies, mining companies, French oil companies simply take all of our wealth because they conquered it five centuries ago. We can identify with the—we know what the Palestinians are fighting for.

And yet, in a way, they’re also saying, well, wait a minute, look at what Israel’s doing.

Israel says, God gave us this land. We used to have it. Well, the South Americans and Africans and Asians are saying, Well, this is our land, but we never left it. We’re still on the land. And even though we’re on the land, we’re still locked up, like Israel is treating the Palestinians. We don’t have to live this way. We can decolonize.

And the whole split of the world and the turning towards the China, Russia, Iran, BRICS

access is an attempt to reverse, undo, and roll back the whole colonial expansion that’s occurred over the last five centuries.

HAIPHONG: You just gave an incredible summary in breaking down the interconnections of these developments, and I wanted to, given that the Near East, West Asia, is so “hot” right now.

Iran just launched numerous strikes in Erbil, in Iraq, against a Mossad headquarters, as well as other targets locating certain terrorist groups that Israel supported. There are reports now of Pakistan, also in northern Pakistan.

There also is the situation with regard to Yemen, the Red Sea crisis that is ongoing. The Ansar Allah movement has just hit an American ship. There’s constant activity there. And of course, there’s still the conflict you mentioned, the fighting going on in Gaza, the brutal attack on the people of Palestine that has been correctly labeled a genocide.

And here’s what Joseph Nye had to say, and I’ll kick it back to you, Michael. He said it with regard to U.S. soft power. In that Financial Times article, he said, The U.S., even so, can seem powerless. It has failed to convince its ally, Israel, to act with restraint in Gaza. Could it have done so in the past? It’s not clear they could have done it 20 years ago. George W. Bush intimated in 1991 that American aid could be cut and that they may have helped to stimulate the Oslo process, but that didn’t bring about two states. Israel is not only, not the only ally that has proved quite capable of resisting the U.S., pointing to Saudi Arabia and others. For the moment, Israel is hurting its own soft power and by extension hurting American soft power.

Kick it back to you, Michael.

HUDSON: This is the big lie that America is trying to promote. The idea that, the pretense that when Blinken goes to talk to Netanyahu, he says, when you drop the next bombs and kill the next 20,000 Gaza-era Palestinians, please be gentle with them. Please obey the laws of war and stop bombing the ambulances, stop bombing the hospitals.

That’s all public relations crap. The reality is that he’s telling Netanyahu to go forward.

It’s America. All these bombs that are dropping are made in America and sent to Israel to drop. Every week, America is saying, Here is a new delivery of bombs. Go to it. Here is billions of dollars more for you to get by while you’ve drafted your working population into the army. America is pushing Israel.

Beginning 50 years ago, I used to travel to work with Netanyahu’s main Mossad and now National Security Advisor, Uzi Arad. I remember, I think I’ve mentioned before on one occasion, we were going to Japan and stopped off in San Francisco for some discussions.

An army officer came up, threw his arms around Uzi and said, you Israelis are our landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Well, that was 50 years ago.

Last week in the New York Times, I hear exactly the same phrase. Israel is our aircraft carrier. To the United States, Israel is America’s Ukraine in the Near East. It’s the United States that is pushing Israel to goad first Lebanon and then Iran into doing something that will justify a huge American attack, trying to do to Iran what Hillary Clinton did to Libya, utterly destroying it and destroying the population. In the process, grabbing its gold supply, we don’t know what’s happened to that, installing ISIS as its foreign legion in as much of Libya as possible and grabbing the Libyan oil supply.

In the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal and on TV, whenever they talk about Hamas or Hezbollah, they don’t say Hamas and Hezbollah. They say “Iran-backed Hamas”,

“Iran-backed Hezbollah”. They don’t talk about the Yemeni army, the Houthis. They say the “Iranian-backed Houthis”. There is a huge public relations push to convince the American population that Iran is the big enemy and President Biden says again and again that Iran is the enemy. The army, Petraeus, and the neocons have said from the very beginning, Iraq and Syria are merely the dress rehearsal for where we really want to go, Iran.

Their hatred of Iran stems from the fact that they overthrew the Iranian government of Mosaddegh back in the 1950s, along with British help as usual. And they’re sure that, well, we’ve hurt you so much that we’re sure you must hate us. And since we know you hate us because of what we’ve done to you, we’ve got to attack you because we’ve made you an enemy by overthrowing your government when we grabbed your oil and put in the Shah that ran a murderous torture regime for a few decades in Iran. Well, that basically is the 7

American policy that is goading it into a war that probably will be more disastrous for the United States than the war in Ukraine was.

At least in Ukraine, all the Americans lost were Ukrainians. And I guess they had a few mercenary troops that they hired over there. But in the Near East, they’re going to lose a lot more than it was at stake in just Ukraine. They’ll probably lose Israel’s role as a landed aircraft carrier. And in fact, they’re going to lose a lot of their own floating aircraft carriers that are near there. And they’ve already lost control of the Red Sea and the oil gulf, basically, between Iran and Egypt.

And there’s also a possibility that they’ll even lose the support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Because even though in the Arab Spring, the Americans pulled a “color revolution”, Arab Spring, where they replaced the hated Egyptian President Mubarak with his own protege, Sisi, who is now running it. Sisi is totally in the US pockets. And yet, the Egyptian population, needless to say, being largely Arabic, is supporting Gaza, not the United States.

Similarly, in Saudi Arabia. Here, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine were in the process of making a rapprochement, actually an alliance with Israel, along sort of the same lines that Greece had been making with Israel for a Mediterranean military force. Well, now much of the Saudi population is Palestinian. They’ve found jobs in Saudi Arabia, and they’re outraged at Saudi Arabia’s trying to sit on the fence at the same time that it has joined the BRICS.

It realizes that all of its foreign reserves are held hostage by the United States. What’s going to be more important to Saudi Arabia? Fighting to protect the Islamic population under attack, or saving its own reserves that are kept in the United States, not to help Saudi Arabia at all.

Same thing with Egypt.

The population there, between Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, these were the main American bastions in the Near East. And now it’s in danger of losing them if, in the case of war, they’re under tremendous political pressure and instability.

And further to the West in Africa, you have the former French colonies also being Islamic.

You can imagine, you know, they’re breaking away not only from France and supporting the rest of Africa, Central Africa, from breaking away from France, but essentially moving into an alliance with the BRICS countries, with Russia and China.

So all of a sudden, the American decision to go to war with Russia in Ukraine after the 2015 Maidan massacre and regime change, putting in the neo-Nazis, you’re having the fighting in Israel. And those two US-sponsored attacks have had the exact opposite effect of what the United States politicians promised. Just as they promised that Russia would break up and essentially the economy would crash under the sanctions and under the force of war, they believed that Israel’s army was so strong that it was going to simply be able to wipe out Hamas.

And the big fighting — there’s not a word of this in the United States press — but the big fighting is on the West Bank. Netanyahu is saying, well, here while they’re all looking at what we’re bombing the civilians and the hospitals and the ambulances and starving Gaza, we’ve distracted the world and we can now wipe out the Arabs on the West Bank and move right into Syria on the Golan Heights. And apparently the United States has promised Israel that it can take whatever it wants of Syria, which it’s still opposing.

We don’t know what Russia is going to do in all of this. Russia, China have been completely silent in all of this. And I can understand they’re silent. China has moved naval ships into the area because it’s itself is very dependent on the Red Sea and the sea lanes to oil in Saudi Arabia.

When the United States keeps saying, threatening, oh, the Yemenis are going to bomb ships there and block the trade, that’s what they want. The United States realizes that if they can goad Yemen and Iran into blocking the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf, this will indeed stop the oil trade. And it’s true that as Yves Smith pointed out in Naked Capitalism today, the sea lanes to Saudi Arabia were closed for many years after the 1967 war. They were closed numerous times for many months. And it’s not unthinkable that they’re closed. But that was then.

Now, if you close them, it will be the main energy buyers in Asia, China, and other countries that are going to be hurt. And that is, from the United States point of view, that will give the United States even more power to control the oil supply of the world as a bargaining chip in trying to renegotiate this new international order.

So you’re having the United States basically play the only tactic that it can actually use.

It can’t use the tactic to say, “We’re the growing economy and you want to trade with us, not with China and Russia,” because they’re growing faster than the U.S. and Europe. They don’t really have anything to offer except the ability to disrupt foreign trade and foreign monetary and financial systems and agree to stop disrupting it if other countries will simply let the United States be the unipolar decision maker.

And I should have added the dimension before when we were talking about China and Russia and the Siberian development. The Eurasian countries have one great advantage over the United States and Europe. The United States and Europe have essentially privatized what was the whole public infrastructure system. And being privatized, they’re now natural monopolies. And they’re run in the way that, say, Thames Water is run in England. They’re run as monopolies that are under-investing and simply using a choke-hold to increase their monopoly rents, which they report as profits.

But China, Russia, Asian countries have kept the basic infrastructure—transportation, education, health care, communications—as public utilities. And they are investing, they are run by engineers, industrial engineers, not financial engineers. And they are run not only much more efficiently, but they don’t have the financial overhead and the monopoly rent overhead that plagues privatized infrastructure. So the cost of production in the non-neoliberalized world, I guess we can call it the world moving towards socialism, is so much more efficient than the neoliberal financialized West that you can see the magnetic pull of Africa and South America.

And as it happens, these are also the main raw material suppliers of the world. So if the United States and Europe don’t have raw materials, don’t produce their own oil, except what the Europeans have to pay enormous markups to American producers, you’re going to have Europe looking pretty much like post-Soviet Latvia and Estonia. The population is going to emigrate. They’re going to shrink. You’re going to have a flowering of interaction throughout all of Eurasia and Africa.

And essentially, the United States can try to stop this by triggering a new oil war in the Near East. But that’s really the last gasp. It’s very unlikely that this is going to lead Taiwan to say, Well, you know, we’re going to follow Ukraine and Israel and you can fight to the last Taiwanese, just as you’re fighting to the last Ukrainian, the last Israeli. I think that the United States is creating a turmoil that is demonstrating to the other world the need for essentially, I won’t call it an iron curtain, but for it to go its own way and for a break in economic systems.

And as President Putin has said again and again, this is a civilizational war. It’s a war to say in what direction is civilization going to go? Is it going to be towards neo-feudalism, back toward feudalism, which is the neoliberal rent-seeking 1%? Or is it going to be towards where industrial capitalism was originally evolving towards, towards socialism and towards raising living standards instead of imposing IMF financial austerity on the dollar block? So that’s the choice that America is seeing in the Near East and in other countries right now.

Are you going to have a future of austerity or essentially prosperity and economic growth?

HAIPHONG: I don’t think there’s a better way to connect all of those developments, especially with regard to what’s happening in the Near East, or what some call the Middle East, or what others call West Asia. I mean, the clashes are escalating. There’s clashes even between Egypt and Israel, which is almost unheard of.

With everything that you said, you’re saying that this is not going to work at all, that the United States won’t be able to wrestle control as it is seeking in the region. How do you see this playing out? Maybe we can close on this point, given that it’s not going to work.

And if it’s not going to work, then what other options do the United States and maybe the broader collective West have? Because you’ve outlined it perfectly, this is an economic war, this is a war for economic dominance and control. So will it just crumble on its own, or will the United States and whoever it can drag along with it, you know, escalate and maneuver in a manner that we should all be aware of?

HUDSON: The United States has one dynamic more than any other country of the world, and that is rage. That is the feeling that you have in Washington now. Not only rage, but as with most rage, it’s combined with fear. The Democrats fear that they’re going to lose the election and that Donald Trump is going to come in and clean up the FBI police state and to get rid of the CIA. That’s basically what he’s pledged to do, the deep state.

So the deep state is worried that it’s going to be, not that the United States is going to be left to stagnate, but that they themselves, their control of the United States will stagnate.

And the deep state is willing to destroy the U.S. economy. The Democratic Party, since Clinton, has the objective of destroying the U.S. economy in order to benefit the control of the 1% over the 99%. And it’s willing to use military war to fight, to escalate in the Near East, to escalate in Ukraine, and to escalate, presumably, in the China Sea to somehow provoke and essentially saying, Well, we’re going to go to war. We’re going to have a grab bag because who wants to live in a world that we don’t control?

Well, just, you know, this is like what Russia said when America was threatening to atom bomb it with its withdrawal from the arms agreements. Russia said, Don’t think that we won’t fight back. Who wants to live in a world without Russia? Well, the United States government is saying, who wants to live in America that we can’t control? That the banks and the military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical complex and basically the finance-monopolist sector can’t control. If we can’t control it, we’re willing to have the whole country go under. That’s really what it is. And they’re using the control of the press for any of this.

For instance, on Saturday and Sunday in Washington, there were huge demonstrations against the attacks on the Palestinians. Not a word of this in the New York Times or not a word of it on television. There’s not a word of what’s happening in the Near East or what President Putin and President Xi are saying in the news at all. It’s as if the world is already divided into a visible world, the deep state world and the invisible world, reality, of the 95% or 85%.

The fight politically towards November is, are people going to be able to really believe that the Biden administration is helping the economy instead of defending the CIA, the FBI, the national security state, the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical complex, real estate, and Wall Street against the population by de-industrializing? Or has all this been a detour that’s made us poor? That’s going to be the question.

And the fact that you’re already having on social media, blocking of any criticism of Israel or the United States, you’re having a kind of control here that is a very similar control that you’re having in the Ukraine.

HAIPHONG: It really is mind blowing how quickly all of these developments have, in many senses, spiraled out of control. Even if we can look at this in years, but even in just the last few months, of course, with October 7th being another breaking point.

HUDSON: I think you should say October 2nd. That was the destruction of the attempt to destroy the mosque. It’s October 2nd that triggered all of this. It was the Israeli attack on the mosque that was intended to say, We are going to destroy the Islamic presence in Palestine so that it can be entirely non-Islamic. That was the declaration of war. So don’t be suckered into the New York Times saying it’s all October 7th.

It began the week earlier, just as in Ukraine. The Ukraine war did not begin with Russia moving to protect its population, its Russian speaking population in Donetsk and Luhansk.

It began not only with Maidan, but with the Ukrainian army shelling, bombing civilian apartment buildings and civilians in the Russian speaking territories and refusing to pay any social security or healthcare to the Russian speaking territories and banning the Russian language. Russia was the country under attack, not the attacker.

So again, you have to be very careful as when you date the beginning of this. And the Americans want to date all wars as when after it attacks and when other countries are protecting themselves. They call other countries protecting themselves an attack on the United States. Yeah.

HAIPHONG: October 7th, February 22nd, 2022. I mean, it’s a tactic. So it’s a great point that you brought up.

And maybe, Michael, we could close our conversation with China because China, you mentioned earlier in your analysis. And, you know, I believe China is the end game here. And there are a few developments. You mentioned China surpassing, in terms of car exports, car manufacturing, Japan, and becoming number one in the world. There and I’m going to pull up the articles as you speak.

There’s also the boards of the major auto manufacturers, the monopolies in a state of shock over BYD, the car manufacturer in China that has essentially taken over the world market with regard to electric vehicles. And there’s also reports that China is going to meet its 5

percent growth target. Despite the fact I’m sure you’ve seen this, Michael, there is collapse after collapse after collapse theory being bandied about in the mainstream media by the deep state. “China’s on the collapse. China’s economy is flailing. It’s declining. It’s crashing.”

So, Michael, I’m going to pull up the pieces as you go. But perhaps you can give your take, your reaction to this development and the notion of China being the end game for the neocons and the monopoly system of post-industrial capitalism, finance capitalism that you write and analyze so much about.

HUDSON: Well, there are a number of reasons why China is becoming the main car producer. This is led by the shift towards electric vehicles. And there’s one key dimension of electric vehicles.

Number one is they’re electric. You need electricity. How are you going to produce the electricity: with American oil, with Russian oil? How are you going to make it with atomic power? The other thing is once you get the electricity into the car, how are you going to get a battery to run the car and not have to keep stopping at the filling station even more often than you have to go to the bathroom?

Well, the answer is you need lithium for that. And China has been controlling most of the lithium sites. And you also need to have computerized vehicles. You need all sorts of materials that are cobalt, the rare earths that also are controlled with China. And China has gained control of most of the metallurgy, of the refining of the key metals that are needed for automobile production and for other industrial production.

So you have China as an integrated economy producing all of these. And you have the West becoming dependent on achieving these same metals. Now, let’s look at what could have happened back in 1990. Suppose there had not been a Cold War. Suppose that America actually in 1990, when the Soviet Union disbanded, America would have disbanded NAT and really had a mutual kind of growth with open, continued international trade.

Well, without the world splitting into the two parts, somehow there wouldn’t have been enough motivation for other countries to explicitly make the civilizational break from neoliberalism to socialism. There would have been a kind of social democracy in Asia, but it could have been the social democracy going the oligarchic way that it’s gone in, say, Sweden, which used to be called a great social democracy. And now it’s the most unequal country in Europe. You could have had slowly that development, but there would have been world trade and anybody could have bought the various metals, lithium, the rare earths. There would have been oil. There would have been continued trade and the whole world economy could have grown.

All of that was broken up by the American insistence that if we can’t control world trade, there won’t be world trade. If we can’t control world international finance and make the whole world use the U.S. dollar that we can print on computers and print and issue to finance all of the military spending to encircle the rest of the world with military bases, if we can’t do that, then there won’t be a world financial system because the United States believed that without the dollar, there couldn’t be de-dollarization because there was no alternative.

They’re tricked into the Margaret Thatcher type slogan. There is no alternative. And they really believe that the rest of the world could not prosper without using the dollar. They could not prosper without selling off and privatizing their public utilities and making natural monopolies that would be bought up by American buyers printing the dollars to say, we’ll print the dollars and we’ll buy your transportation system, your communication system and your factories. They couldn’t believe that there was an alternative to neoliberalism. And yet you’re seeing this. They couldn’t believe that if they simply bombed another country, that somehow the population of that country would say, Oh, we don’t want to be bombed.

We’re going to overthrow our government and support a government that supports you so that you won’t bomb our country anymore.

Instead, the effect of bombing a country when the United States does it is the same as bombing a country when any other country does it. It galvanizes the population together to oppose the country that’s bombing it and defend the country that’s under attack. So the whole image that the United States has is, there’s only one actor in the world, and that’s us. And we can smash other countries. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll upset the chessboard and just wreck the whole game.

So the United States is acting in the role of wrecker and other countries are in the role of builder. And the whole global majority is saying, What side do you want to be on, the wreckers or the builders?

And you can look at Ukraine as an example of how the United States would like Russia, China, and the Arab countries to exist. You would suspend elections once you have your guys, your president in there. You would become the most corrupt country in your region, as Ukraine has been. You will ban local languages and religions that are not Judeo-Christian.

You will essentially prevent strikes.

And you know the joke, the aristocrats. A stage group of actors talks about a family coming on and doing all sorts of horrendously devious sexual acts and incest, and it goes on and on. The producer who’s being offered this act and said, what do you call this act? And the answer is, the aristocrats.

Well, what do you call the Ukrainian act of suspending elections, banning foreign languages, assassinating critics? We call it democracy. Well, that’s hilarious. That’s indeed what America calls it. America has two models of democracy, Ukraine and Israel. Again and again in the press, it says Ukraine is the model of democracy that we want for what used to be the whole Soviet Union. And you have Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania clapping, and we want the democracy in Israel. Israel is the only democratic country in the Near East.

We want Israel to be the model for the Near East.

Well, what are they saying? That there won’t be any more Arabs in the Near East? That they’ll all be Americans with dual citizenship? This is what it’s all come to. We’re living in an Orwellian world is trying to deter people’s consciousness from realizing the reality of work and the dynamics that are at work. And how long can you convince people that they’re really not doing well just because the 1% is doing well? How can you convince the people that America is really a model leader when it’s trying to destroy the whole rest of the world instead of helping it, as at least it could pose to be doing back in 1945 when World War II ended?

You’re having really unwinding of the whole world system of the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations, the whole diplomatic system of the world that was put together in 1945 is now being outmoded. And you could see the inability of the United Nations to cope with the war in the Near East, to cope with the war in Ukraine. This is the death knell of the old world. And you’re seeing a new world being created spontaneously, not ideologically, but basically spontaneously in an ad hoc fashion by China, Russia, and the 99%.

HAIPHONG: Yes. Yeah, yes, indeed, Michael. And, you know, final thoughts on the fact that given all that you said, and this reality, I mean, it’s this myth and reality, the myth, the idea, that China’s collapsing, you know, China’s economy is in decline. And yet you have not only these recent developments, but you also have these broader developments that you speak of.

So can you just give a sense, you’ve been to China, you’ve studied China’s economy very deeply. Just to close, help our audience here understand why China’s economy is able to industrialize like it is.

Europe is about to go through this probe. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, this probe of the, you know, Chinese auto manufacturing, especially around electric vehicles, because of these nefarious state subsidies. Can you talk about this, talk about China’s economy, how it works, and why Europe and the United States, of course, has been waging economic war as well, why they would resort to what seems to be counterproductive measures?

HUDSON: Well, the key to understanding the West is neoliberalism is privatization of basic needs and basic utilities. The most important public utility throughout history has always been the ability to create money and credit.

And what China has that no other country had was its central bank created the own money.

And when the government creates money through the treasury, spending money into the economy, it spends money in order to actually build things, mainly to build real estate, to house the Chinese, but also to build the high speed railroads, to provide an educational system, universities all over China, to build communications.

Other countries, such as the United States, don’t have this. Money is created, especially in the United States, by commercial banks, and they create money not to finance new construction of factories or new investment of any sorts. Banks lend money in the West against collateral that is already in place. You can go to a bank to get money to buy a building that exists, an office building, although the office building’s prices are all collapsing now. You can go and borrow money to buy a whole company. That’s what private capital does. It buys money to buy Sears. It drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and fires the [workers].

It can buy Toys R Us, drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and it’s gone. You can buy companies and loot them and essentially close them down and turn factories into gentrified buildings for the 1% of financial operatives who are doing the looting.

But banks in the West do not fund public utilities, and once you cut the taxes and force a government into deficit, you then finance the deficit by privatizing your roads, turning them into toll roads. You privatize your postal system. You privatize your health care system so that there’s not much health care anymore, as you have in England, for instance, the crisis that you’re having in English medicine and hospitals and privatization. You make the whole economy in the West look like England after Margaret Thatcher, where people who are actually wage earners can’t afford to live in London anymore. That’s for the foreign investors or the people who work in the financial sector. The wage earners have to live in suburbs to take privatized rail transportation.

In the United States, for instance, Greyhound, the bus system, was just bought out by private equity. They did exactly what Stagecoach, England’s largest bus company, did in England. They sold off the bus terminal that was in the center of the city that people would go to to catch the buses, and they sold it for gentrified real estate and told people, there’s now a parking lot we have on the outside of the city. You go and wait in the parking lot.

We hope it’s not raining or too cold or snowing, but we don’t have a terminal anymore. Well, you can just imagine this way of doing things. It turns into a race to the bottom.

Well, China, by [keeping control of] finance, really controls who is going to get the credit, and credit is really the economic planner. Neoliberalism in the West says the government shouldn’t do the planning. Wall Street should do the planning because Wall Street is what provides the credit that determines who is going to get the resources and what they’re going to do with it.

Well, Wall Street gives the credit to financial engineers that are trying to make money by increasing stock prices, increasing capital gains, and making money financially.

It’s true that China has made many billionaires. That was part of the Let 100 Flowers Grow, but now that it’s had that spontaneous growth, now it’s seen what forms work and what forms don’t work. Now it’s consolidating the economy to essentially create credit to finance tangible industrial growth, tangible infrastructure growth, tangible agricultural modernization, and general improvement of living standards.

The whole aim of the Chinese economy is growth, not looting and downsizing and a smash-up of corporate raiding. There’s no corporate raiding going on in China. There’s not going to be any financial interest that’s going to buy Huawei or the other Chinese developers. You don’t have the parasitical financial class that have become the central economic planners of the United States.

Because that’s what libertarianism is. Libertarians want a centralized economy, not run by government but run by Wall Street and the financial sector. The libertarians are essentially the advocates of what normally used to be called fascism, central planning by the wealthy financial and monopoly sector against the population at large.

You have the Republican and the Democratic Party both supporting a dismantling of government just with a different kind of rhetoric, but the same policies, the same military policies and the same anti-industrial policies. China, Russia and their now more and more BRICS countries are rejecting that whole self-defeating neo-feudal path of growth.

HAIPHONG: Well, Michael, you’ve been very generous with your time today. I really appreciate you giving this what was an incredible rundown of all the interconnections, all the developments geopolitically that have, at their base, economic roots. And so, Michael, thank you so much.

Where can people find you? I have your website in the video description.

HUDSON: My website is michael-hudson.com and there’s a Patreon list associated with that. But all my articles are on my website and the other sites that I publish on, Naked Capitalism and Counterpunch and other such sites.

HAIPHONG: Well, definitely check out his work. He has a number of books that are key reads. So, Michael, it was great to be with you. Thanks so much for joining me today and I’ll talk to you again soon.

HUDSON: Thanks for having me. We were lucky politically, but the whole world was at a turning point this week, it looks like.

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