Friends talking on Plan Asset Seizure Europe and Japan Militarization

This is what fell on the radar of friends quietly talking:

Financial implications of EU and UK emergency powers.

https://theduran.com/uk-banks-warn-starmer-asset-seizure-plan-illegal-kiev-energy-close-to-collapse-siversk-huiliapole/

11 Dec 2025. Mercouris. 1 hour, 9 mins.

https://www.ft.com/content/7e90d3be-687c-4348-a663-132576f98086

11 Dec 2025. UK Bankers’ warning to UK government. [Behind a paywall.]

https://tass.com/society/2057847

12 Dec 2025. Bank of Russia files a lawsuit against Euroclear in Moscow Arbitration Court

https://tass.com/politics/2057999

12 Dec 2025. EU to rue indefinite freezing of Russian assets — RDIF CEO

https://theduran.com/eu-crosses-rubicon-permanent-asset-freeze-falls-into-russias-trap/

12 Dec 2025. Christoforou & Mercouris. 31 mins.

Japan has opposed the EU seizure of Russian assets, and the move below may be related to this, because the seizure could  could lead to a wider war.

https://tass.com/economy/2058013

12 Dec 2025. Japan moves to allocate record $58 billion for defense in 2026 fiscal year — Kyodo

Reply by President Vladimir Putin on Donald Trump’s 28-point peace plan re Ukraine

Reply (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/78524)by President Vladimir Putin to a question during the working session with the permanent members of Russia’s Security Council (November 21, 2025)

Question: Donald Trump’s 28-point peace plan on the Ukrainian crisis is now being actively discussed worldwide. May I ask to share your opinion on this plan and explain how it relates to your recent talks with President Trump in Alaska?

President Putin: It’s no secret: President Trump’s peace plan for Ukrainian crisis resolution was discussed even before the meeting in Alaska, and during that preliminary exchange the US Side asked us to make certain compromises – to show what they called “flexibility”.

The main point of the Alaska summit, its main purpose, was that during the talks in Anchorage we confirmed that, despite some difficult issues and complexities, we nevertheless agreed with these proposals and were prepared to demonstrate the requested flexibility.

We provided detailed information to all our friends and partners in the Global South on these matters – including China, India, the DPRK, South Africa, Brazil, many other countries, and, of course, the CSTO states. All our friends and partners, and I want to emphasise this – without exception – supported these potential arrangements.

However, after the negotiations in Alaska, we have seen a certain pause on the part of the US, and we know this is due to Ukraine’s de facto refusal to accept the peace plan proposed by President Trump. I believe this is precisely why a new version has emerged – essentially an updated plan consisting of 28 points.

We have the text. We received it through our existing channels of communication with the US Administration. I believe it too could form the basis of a final peace settlement, but this text is not being discussed with us in substance. And I can suggest why.

The reason, I believe, remains the same: the US Administration still cannot secure Ukraine’s consent – Ukraine rejects it.

Evidently, Ukraine and its European allies remain under illusions and still dream of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield. I think this position is rooted not so much in a lack of competence – I will leave this topic aside for now – but rather in the absence of objective information about the real situation on the ground.

And, all things considered, neither Ukraine nor Europe grasp the consequences of this path. Just one very recent example – Kupyansk. Not long ago, on 4 November – just two weeks ago – officials in Kiev publicly stated that no more than 60 Russian servicemen were present in the city, and that within the next few days, as they claimed, Ukrainian forces would fully unblock it.

But I would like to inform you that already at that moment, on 4 November, the city of Kupyansk was practically entirely secured by the Russian Armed Forces. Our guys were, as they say, simply finishing the job – clearing the remaining streets and neighbourhoods. The fate of the city had already been fully determined.

What does this tell us? Either the Kiev leaders do not have objective information about the situation at the front, or, having it, they are simply unable to assess it objectively.

If Kiev does not want to discuss President Trump’s proposals and rejects them, then they – and their European war-instigators – must understand that the situation in Kupyansk will inevitably be repeated on other key sectors of the front.

Perhaps not as quickly as we would like, but the outcome will be inevitably repeated .

And, on the whole, this is acceptable to us, as it leads to achieving the objectives of the special military operation by military means. But, as I have said many times before, we are also ready for peace negotiations and for resolving problems by peaceful means. However, this requires a substantive discussion of all details of the proposed plan. We are ready for that.

Ukraine Peace Plan: Its not gonna work sweety pie!

Trump’s full 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine is out, and, much like Gaza, it’s not a peace plan but a cheap and obnoxious grasp to enslave Russia via pretending a position of strenth.

In reality I did not want to discuss this, because what’s the use of discussing something that may never be. If this ever reaches Russia on a professional basis, Russia will do what it does – consider it seriously and professionally, respond and continue the SMO as Russia is not for sale.

Yet again the tone of this is attempts to utilize dwindling economic rights as a wedge for military intervention to expand the hegemonic stake. This is the team; Steve Witkoff, with Marco Rubio and Jared Kushner, which is an insult in itself, that was behind drafting this draft? or set of negotiating points? I don’t even know what it is as it is messy, equal to the unworkable deal that is on the table for Gaza and the Palestinians. It is all about obnoxious hegemonic control and setting back organizations such as BRICS and SCO with multipolarity.

We saw Mr Putin’s response today, viscerally, when he visited the front, in camo. That is the answer. As we’ve known now forever, the end of the Ukraine SMO will be decided on the battle ground. https://sovereignista.com/2025/11/20/full-subbed-version-of-visit-of-vladimir-putin-to-the-command-post-of-the-west-group-of-forces/

• The plan was drafted by Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, with Marco Rubio and Jared Kushner.
• They coordinated directly with Kirill Dmitriev, Russia’s sanctioned envoy.
• Zelensky wasn’t a choice: the U.S. delivered the plan to him on an “aggressive timeline,” and he’s been told he must engage.

Trump’s Full 28-Point Ukraine–Russia Plan (Verbatim Structure)

1. Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed.

2. A comprehensive non-aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe; all ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled.

3. Russia will not invade neighboring countries, and NATO will not expand further.

4. A U.S.-mediated Russia–NATO dialogue will be launched to resolve security issues and promote cooperation.
(Desperate attempt to maintain NATO).

5. Ukraine will receive “reliable security guarantees.”
Note: For the first time, the U.S. explicitly offers Ukraine a formal security guarantee, details unspecified.

6. Ukraine’s military will be capped at 600,000 personnel. (Current size: ~800–850k.)

7. Ukraine must enshrine permanent neutrality: it will never join NATO, and NATO will codify that.

8. NATO agrees not to station troops on Ukrainian territory.

9. European fighter jets will be stationed in Poland.

10. The U.S. security guarantee comes with conditions:
– The U.S. receives compensation
– If Ukraine invades Russia, the guarantee is void
– If Russia invades Ukraine, sanctions snap back and recognition of territory is withdrawn
– If Ukraine fires a missile at Moscow or St. Petersburg “without cause,” the guarantee is void

11. Ukraine becomes eligible for EU membership and receives temporary preferential access to EU markets.

12. A global reconstruction package is launched, including:
– A Ukraine Development Fund
– Joint U.S.–Ukraine energy projects
– Modernization of Ukrainian infrastructure
– Investment in mining and natural resources
– A World Bank financing package (Note: The World Bank is a dodo!)

13. Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy:
– Gradual lifting of sanctions
– Long-term U.S.–Russia economic cooperation
– Joint ventures in AI, energy, infrastructure, rare earths, and Arctic extraction
– Russia rejoins the G8
Note: And now one can only laugh at the attempted grab of resources and the overt attempt to step back to before BRICS and SCO)

14. Frozen Russian assets will be allocated as follows:
– $100B used to rebuild Ukraine (run by the U.S.)
– The U.S. receives 50% of profits from reconstruction investments
– Europe contributes another $100B
– Remaining frozen assets go into a U.S.–Russia joint investment vehicle to deepen economic ties
(Note: These ‘negotiators’ have gone bereft of their minds. See what this says. The US will use Russian money to rebuild Ukraine).

15. A joint U.S.–Russia security working group will monitor compliance.

16. Russia will codify in law a policy of non-aggression toward Europe and Ukraine. Note: one word! NATO. Russia needs to codify nothing much.

17. The U.S. and Russia will extend nuclear arms-control treaties, including New START.
Note: These folks are deaf. Russia told them in no uncertain terms that arms-control treaties will not be negotiated under the SMO

18. Ukraine reaffirms its non-nuclear status under the NPT.

19. The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant will be operated under IAEA supervision, and electricity will be split 50/50 between Russia and Ukraine.

20. Education and social programs promoting multicultural tolerance will be mandated in both countries:
– Ukraine adopts EU standards for minority rights
– Both sides end discriminatory laws
– Equal media rights for Ukrainian and Russian outlets
– All Nazi ideology must be banned
Note: Very similar to provisions in Trump’s 2020 Israel–Palestine “Peace to Prosperity” plan.

21. Territorial arrangements:
– Crimea, Donetsk, and Lugansk are recognized as de facto Russian, including by the U.S.
– Parts of Kherson and Zaporozhye become frozen “contact line” zones (also de facto recognition)
– Russia gives up other agreed areas
– Ukraine withdraws from remaining parts of Donetsk; the zone becomes a Russian-recognized neutral buffer
– Russian forces cannot enter the buffer zone

22. Both sides agree not to alter future borders by force; security guarantees void if Ukraine violates this.

23. Russia guarantees Ukraine access to the Dnieper River and free Black Sea grain shipping.

24. A humanitarian committee is created to:
– Exchange all prisoners and bodies (“all for all”)
– Return detained civilians and children
– Implement family reunification
– Provide aid to victims of the conflict

25. Ukraine must hold national elections within 100 days of the agreement.

26. Full amnesty for all parties for all actions taken during the war: no prosecutions, no war-crimes claims.

27. The agreement will be legally binding and enforced by a Peace Council chaired by Donald J. Trump.
Note: This is the same governing structure Trump’s Gaza peace plan uses, a Trump-chaired oversight body empowered to impose sanctions. Yeah, Russia will agree to a Peace Council chaired by a buffoon when pigs fly!

28. A ceasefire begins as soon as both sides pull back to agreed positions.

—

There is one answer to this, and it is NO, because it is a set of provisions written by a now pretend hegemon that is losing its power and desperately extending itself from a position of old and hackneyed beliefs in its own superiority.

There is one solution and it is to be found in the salacious parts of the Epstein emails. SEND IN BUBBA TO RELIEVE THE DESPERATION as this is a sick joke made by the demented who cannot acknowledge that they’ve lost and will continue to lose!

There is a serious part though and this is that the assault on Russia and the free world will continue until the hegemon falls. On that note, just in is a briefing from the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. Part of it reads as follows:

Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (http://svr.gov.ru/smi/2025/11/potseluy-erevana.htm):

The Press Bureau of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of Russia reports that, according to information received by the SVR, experts from the foreign-policy and defence agencies of leading European states are literally “sounding the alarm drums”, warning their national governments of the approaching collapse of the Western-engineered “Anti-Russia” project in Ukraine.

Reports sent to high-level offices directly state that the military defeat of the Kiev regime is inevitable.
Particular attention is paid to the all-consuming corruption in Ukraine, where the generous contributions of foreign donors simply disappear without a trace.

US planning Gaza ‘green zone’ under Israeli control

While we wait to see what the outcome is of Russia’s counter resolution at the UNSC on a plan for Gaza and the whole of Palestine, here is the US plan fleshed out.

https://russiaun.ru/en/news/comment_gaza_141125

From the Cradle

US planning Gaza ‘green zone’ under Israeli control
——
The Trump administration is reportedly planning a long-term division of Gaza into a “green zone” under Israeli and international military control and a “red zone” left in ruins, according to documents seen by The Guardian. Foreign troops would initially deploy alongside Israeli forces east of Gaza, divided by the current “yellow line.” Officials admit reunification is “aspirational,” raising doubts about Washington’s commitment to an enduring political settlement.

Plans for Gaza’s future have shifted rapidly: first promoting fenced “alternative safe communities” for Palestinians, then dropping the idea entirely. Humanitarian groups say they were not informed of the changes.

The evolving proposal centers on a so-called international stabilization force starting with a few hundred troops and potentially growing to 20,000, though many countries are unwilling to deploy forces to Gaza.

Reconstruction would begin only inside the “green zone,” with the US hoping improved conditions lure Palestinians across Israeli lines, a plan which echoes failed US strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

US Plans for China Blockade Continue Taking Shape

Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: China Just REJECTED Trump’s ‘Surrender Plan’

Modest concessions from China that were not a sacrifice. Xi enabled Trump to get what he really wants, a public relations orchestration.

MI6 Plan to cut China into three countries

Nuri Vittachi tells this extraordinary story, aspects of which you no doubt are aware of.

Unearthed documents show that MI6, the British spy service, planned to cut China into three separate countries. The British plan was formulated as recently as the 1990s—and part of it is STILL RUNNING NOW.

This is an extraordinary story which researchers uncovered from historical documents, and which was presented at a university conference recently. Full details with sources are in the video report. Summary of 15 key points are below.

1.) In the early 1990s, agents at British spy agency MI6 consulted UK academic Gerald Segal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs on how to chop China into three countries.

2.) The UK’s key players would be Uyghur separatists. “Xinjiang has long been a target of British intelligence— with London hoping to manipulate the Uighur refugees from Xinjiang and Uighurs still there, into cannon fodder for London’s plans to break up China…” (Journal of Strategic Studies).

3.) Enter a real-life secret agent—a Turkish man named Catli of the Grey Wolves, who shared MI6 goals in Xinjiang. A book about a related CIA venture called Operation Gladio said Catli “helped the Uyghurs… mount insurrectionary attacks that killed 162 people”.

4.) To understand this story, it’s vital to know that the west falsely presents an image of Xinjiang as a place where one ethnic group are prisoners and the other are oppressive overlords. Not true. In Xinjiang, people with Uyghur background can commonly be found as police officers, army soldiers, and local officials, including the ones right at the top—chairman of the regional government.

5.) In March 1992, the chairman of the regional government, Tomur Dawamat, issued a warning: “Hostile forces, both at home and abroad, have stepped up their infiltration, subversion and sabotage.”

6.) At the time, the CIA was backing separatist Isa Yusef Alptekin, another backer of the Grey Wolves. In a 1992 speech he said: “The time for collapse and dissolution has arrived for the Chinese empire.”

7.) The Americans gave his son Erkin Alptekin a job in US anti-China propaganda. In the 1990s, he worked for Radio Liberty, a US media propaganda unit, part of the Radio Free Asia cluster.

8.) By 1994, academic Gerald Segal had finished the map showing how to cut China into three countries. The US had already circulated stories of a “Tibetan genocide” to prepare for this.

9.) As part of their Central Asian program, the US had devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to get the mujahideen rebels to train groups of guerilla fighters. They added hundreds of Xinjiang separatists to join the training. (This project eventually backfired for the Americans – the central Asian guerilla groups they were financing give birth to al-Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban.)

10.) Western forces worked further with secret agent Catli, who created more trouble in Central Asia and China. But he made lots of enemies and was killed in a suspicious car crash in Turkey in 1996.

11.) From 1996 to 2002, other agents continued to train Uyghur separatists in China, who went on to make multiple terrorist attacks. FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds later wrote: “Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed, and helped execute every single uprising and terror-related scheme in Xinjiang.” (This US government denies this.)

12.) Problems arose for the western agents: UN data showed that the Tibetan population was growing faster than other Chinese groups– the opposite of a genocide. Also, there was also growing public knowledge that the “Tibet exiles/ Dalai Lama” project in India had been set up and financed by the CIA. So the “cut-China-into-three” plan became “cut-China-into-two”.

13.) In 2004, the US hosted the founding of East Turkistan as “a country”. For convenience, they decided to have the prime minister in Washington DC instead of China, selecting a man named Anwar Jusuf Turani from Fairfax, Virginia. The new “country” did not get international recognition by anyone – not even the United States!

14.) Between 2007 and 2014, there were a large number of terrorist attacks in China by members of the East Turkistan project the west had encouraged into being.

In a 2009 operation, separatists used Facebook to co-ordinate a massive attack in which 197 people died. In another, a huge car bomb in Urumqi killed 43 people and wounded 94. At Kunming’s train station, an attack by eight knife-wielding terrorists killed 29 people and wounded 140.

Xinjiang’s leaders, with help from the central government, sent in police officers and soldiers to halt the carnage—and, against extraordinary odds, succeeded.

15.) In the 20-teens, it was time for the Americans to use their superpower – narrative control.

They needed to do three things:

i) Get journalists and academics to cut all mentions of MI6 or CIA involvement in Chinese Uyghur stories.

ii) Trick the public into seeing the terrorists who had killed so many innocent people as the oppressed victims.

iii) Mislead everyone into believing that the authorities trying to stop the murder of innocents were the root cause of the problem.

Creating this new, upside-down narrative may sound like a tall order – but, incredibly, they managed to attain all three goals.

They did this by relentless circulation of mainstream media news reports which painted a picture in which “oppression” by “the Chinese” had “created” the violence. (See the video for detailed examples.)

The US then organized a 2019 meeting in Washington to relaunch the debunked “Tibet genocide” narrative as a Uyghur genocide hoax. The story continues.

Michael Hudson & Radhika Desai: Geopolitical Economy, New Season

Who Plans the Economy?

RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to a new season of Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that explores the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. We are beginning this new season with our 50th episode. I’m Radhika Desai, and joining me today is one of our regulars and favorites, indeed, the person with whom I inaugurated this show, Professor Michael Hudson. Welcome again, Michael.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be back here.

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: Great. Now, as we record this, the Federal Open Markets Committee of the U.S. Federal Reserve, whose decision set interest rates, has just finished its six-weekly meeting. And as some of you may know, they have agreed to decrease interest rates, the first decrease this year, by 25 basis points.

Not a big move, but the fact is the Federal Reserve has been the focus of a lot of controversy recently. And much of the controversy comes from Donald Trump. Anyone paying the slightest attention to the news these days cannot have failed to notice that Trump has a thing about the Federal Reserve, an itch, shall we say, one that he can’t help scratching.

He’s called Powell a numbskull and too late – which is to say he’s, according to Trump, always too late to lower interest rates – while demanding that Powell reduce interest rates. He undertook a theatrical visit to the renovations of the Federal Reserve’s Marriner Eccles building, disputing a difference of $300 million in costs in front of TV cameras, as if this few million dollars were consequential in a country whose debt is shooting north of 150% and 37 trillion US dollars.

It’s long been clear that he’s not going to renew the tenure of the current chair Jerome Powell and has already used the early retirement of one governor to place a loyalist on the board. And while he has recently named four candidates that he is considering for the position of chair, speculation rages far wider.

So some people are talking about more than 10 candidates. In yet another salvo at the Federal Reserve, Trump has, of course, tried to fire one of its governors, Lisa Cook, for cause he says, but so far he’s been unsuccessful with the most recent legal ruling, leaving her in place for today’s critical Federal Open Markets Committee meeting. So many questions arise from this.

While economists loyal to Trump have been publishing papers and writing commentaries on the Federal Reserve’s problematic easy money policies, Trump actually demands that the Federal Reserve keep monetary policy easy. So is there a coherent Trump administration policy towards the Federal Reserve? Secondly, while Trump wants the dollar to remain the world’s currency, he also seems determined to undermine the much doubted independence of the Federal Reserve.

So even as the easy money he wants certainly ensures that the Federal Reserve will not be able to rein in inflation, a standing threat to the dollar system. Inflation raises yet another question. While general inflation remains high – and it has gone up ahead of this meeting despite low energy prices – driven by high food prices, undoubtedly a result of Trump’s own tariffs, and core inflation – that is inflation discounting volatile food and energy prices – also remains high, Trump, on the one hand, continues to insist that he has brought down living costs, meanwhile ensuring that nothing that the Federal Reserve does will reduce it.

And then there’s the matter of cryptocurrency. With the passage of the Genius Act, a whole new set of assets, very dodgy assets, namely cryptocurrency, which any sane analyst would consider highly volatile, risky, and inherently speculative, have been given the imprimatur of government regulation.

This means that one way or another, these assets will enter the financial system and become one more thing in the everything bubble, taking the fragility of the U.S. financial system, which is already at breaking points, even closer to it. Any crash that now occurs can only consign the dollar system to the dustbin of history, as we’ve discussed so many times, Michael. So Michael, what’s your favorite drive about this morass of contradictions in which Trump is only further muddying with his attacks on the Federal Reserve? Go with whatever is on the top of your head because there’s so much to discuss. We can start anywhere.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: Trump’s head is full of junk economics. He wants to depreciate the dollar. He wants the dollar’s exchange rate to go down because he imagines that this will make U.S. exports more competitive. As the dollar goes down, its price against European currencies and foreign currencies gets cheaper. The problem is America has been deindustrialized over the last 30 years, and there’s not that much to export.

And by lowering interest rates, what he’s actually doing is the exact opposite of what his Secretary Treasurer Scott Bessent, has done. It’s as if he wants to go back to the zero interest rate policy of making money by debt leveraging, by inflating the prices of stocks and bonds because you can borrow inexpensively from the banks and you can buy a stock whose dividends are higher or a bond whose rates are higher. He wants to make the economy safe for speculators again because they’re his constituency, after all.

Well, here’s the problem. The sane people on Wall Street, I guess the 1%, or people like you and me, are criticizing him from the point of view of what’s the independence of the Federal Reserve. If you have Donald Trump intervening in Federal Reserve policy, micromanaging under his imagination of how the Federal Reserve affects policy, or his pretense or cover story for serving his campaign contributors, then you’re going to have instability and probably inflation.

And of course, Trump pretends that he’s against inflation. But as you’ve just pointed out, tariffs are increasing inflation. And his vast, wonderful budget cuts (budget deficit), by slashing taxes on the wealthiest 10% and raising them on the bottom 90%, are going to inflate the economy. So he’s sort of overseeing instability.

And the question for many years – there’s been this mantra for the last century: the central bank has to be independent because central banks are responsible. And we all know that governments are irresponsible because they’re elected and they’re democratic and they want to spend money for welfare into the economy, and that’s inflationary. And they want full employment, and that’ll push up wages.

Instead the Fed’s job, ever since Paul Volcker, is to create enough unemployment to prevent wages from going up. What’s wrong with this picture, again, as you and I have discussed, is the Federal Reserve serves its member banks, the commercial banks. And if there’s any sector of the economy that’s more irresponsible, it’s the banking sector, because that’s what’s led to the financialization of the economy and the deindustrialization and the incredible debt overhead that we have today.

So there’s no reason to believe that the Federal Reserve is more responsible than the government. I’m not saying the government’s responsible because the same Wall Street billionaires that control the banks control the government itself. So you’re going to lose either way around. So the problem is: the Federal Reserve has taken over from Congress the management of the whole economy.

And as you and I have discussed, and I think you will today, trying to manage the economy just by affecting interest rates by buying and selling securities by open market operations is only one sliver of the economy and it misses the whole big picture, which is all about industrialization. how you organize what corporations are going to do with the revenue they get, are they going to buy the stock back their stock and push up stock prices and pay out dividends, or are they going to invest long term.

That’s really what it’s all about, and the Federal Reserve is not concerned with that at all. It’s just concerned about providing money to the banks and banks don’t lend money into the real economy, they lend money for stocks and bonds for financial speculation and you could look at the Federal Reserve as the implementer of the Ponzi scheme into which the United States economy has degenerated.

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: Well, you’ve made so many different points so let’s just take them by turn. First of all, let’s take the whole issue of the so-called independence of the Federal Reserve. Now you know, at one level, in the post-Second World War period for the first several decades, it was actually assumed that monetary policy was just one of the instruments in the hands of governments, elected governments, to keep the economy going, etc., so it was not assumed that that central banks would have to be independent.

The independence of the central banks has become a mantra and has become this rule of thumb, this principle that cannot be violated, only in the age of financialization. So when you said, Michael, a couple of things that already suggested this, which is that what the Federal Reserve has done over the last several decades is essentially inflate asset bubbles.

It has essentially lent money primarily to financial institutions, not so that the financial institutions will invest in the real economy. That possibility has already been thrown out of the window by the Federal Reserve in its role as the regulator of the financial sector, essentially because for decades, going back to certainly the early 80s, if not earlier, every time there has been any kind of a regulatory problem, the default position has always been to deregulate, not to re-regulate.

We can discuss that further, but there has been deregulation. The Federal Reserve essentially lends money to banks, which then use it for asset price inflation and so on. The easy money policy, particularly since the early part of this century, has been instrumental; first in blowing the housing and credit bubbles, which burst in 2008, and now in blowing up this everything bubble we are in.

So essentially the independence of the Federal Reserve, what it actually amounts to, the so-called independence of the Federal Reserve effectively means regulatory capture. That is to say, the regulator becomes captured by those it is supposed to regulate. It’s like essentially asking the fox to defend the chicken coop. It’s not going to happen. So, essentially, that’s why financial interests have been in the lead.

You said something else that’s really interesting, and that is that in recent decades there has not been any serious fiscal policy. What there has been is only monetary policy posing as the only form of management of the government. And in my own writing, in my geopolitical economy, where I track the financial policies and the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve, particularly in relation to the dollar system but also in relation to the management of the U.S. economy, what I discovered is that, certainly by the Clinton administration, if not earlier, there was basically no serious fiscal policy. The only fiscal policy was that Republican administrations would always reduce taxes on big corporations.

Then Democratic administrations would come in; they would not touch it but they would engage in fiscal consolidation, essentially by cutting social services and so on, which Republican administrations also did. And then the next Republican administration comes in and reduces taxes further. So, essentially, what this has also done, of course, is vastly increase the debt mountain of the United States. Because while you are cutting social services to some extent, it’s not nearly enough to account for the revenue you are foregoing by giving corporations big tax cuts.

So for the last many decades, what we have had in terms of economic management was simply monetary policy. And this really began with Alan Greenspan, and that’s why Alan Greenspan was himself called the maestro, as though he was, as a kind of superstar conductor, conducting the orchestra that was the U.S. economy with the slightest movements of his little baton.

But of course, in reality, what you had was essentially a situation in which they gave up trying to manage the U.S. economy. They gave up trying to preserve the productive character of the U.S. economy. They, in fact, encouraged things like outsourcing, financialization, etc. So they have essentially destroyed the U.S. economy, made it an economy based on consumption, etc. So, in all of these ways, what you’ve seen is that monetary policy has displaced any fiscal policy and thereby hangs many other threads.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: They’ve not only deregulated monetary policy, they’ve deregulated crime. President Obama appointed Eric Holder as Attorney General, and Holder said, it’s true that there was an enormous crime wave that’s led to the financial crisis; junk mortgage lending, the banks have falsified mortgage statements, the appraisers have falsified them, the brokers have falsified them, there have been billions of dollars, and we have a choice.

As a result of this financial fraud, the mortgages of about 8 million American families are way overpriced beyond the ability to pay. What are we going to do? Well, we have a choice: either we can write down the debts, as President Obama had promised, to the reasonable, realistic value of their houses and enable these families to be saved from the exploitation of the banks, or we can prosecute the bankers and throw them in jail.

But there’s a problem with that. These bankers, most of them, are married with children, and their children and wives are innocent. And it would be wrong to hurt their innocence because if you look at the value of the life and the family happiness of a multi-billionaire, 10 billionaires are worth the 8 million Hispanic and black and other families that we’re expropriating.

So we’re not going to punish anybody. In fact, what we’re going to do is turn to the Federal Reserve and say, make sure that, although the banks are insolvent because they’ve lent much more money than the debtors can pay, we’re going to create the largest financial boom in history, the largest bond market boom in history, by slashing interest rates from the current highs all the way down to less than 1%, which is going to enormously increase the capitalization of bonds and stocks.

And so Obama appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman, and then Janet Yellen. And their job was to prevent the banks from writing down the debt to what could be paid and, say, our job is to not to stabilize consumer prices, but to make sure that we stabilize and prevent asset prices for stocks and bonds and real estate from going down. Because if the economy is so highly leveraged and banks have lent out so much money relative to their capital reserves, if prices go down even a little bit, one or two percent, you’ve wiped out the equity of the largest bank customers, the largest speculators, and the banks themselves will go under.

And so the head of the Federal Reserve Deposit Insurance Corporation said, you know there’s one really crooked, incompetent bank; that’s Citibank. It’s so reckless that we’ve got to foreclose on it. And Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, said, no, no, my job is to save Citibank. You know, they’re the people who put me in power. And hey, Mr. Obama, they have put you in power through Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. So you have the banks running the justice system and the prosecution system, as well as the financial system.

And the common aim of all of them is to make sure that the banks will not lose money by writing down the debt that you’ve just described as growing. If you don’t write down the debt and it accrues interest and is growing and growing and growing, then you have to create more and more and more money at lower and lower interest rates to carry this higher debt. That’s what a Ponzi scheme is.

You need new entrants into the scheme to provide the money to bail out the early investors, or the whole scheme fails. That’s what the United States economy has turned into, and that’s what the independence of the Federal Reserve means. Don’t let anyone, or the prosecution system, or laws against fraud, or even common sense, interfere with creating an economy that makes money by financial speculation, not by industrial investment. We’re not an industrial economy anymore.

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: Well, exactly. And you know what, Michael, Look at this. We’ve shown this chart before, but this is the chart of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. As you know, it went from under a trillion dollars to about $2 trillion in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. And then, with a series of rounds of quantitative easing, it went up to above $4 trillion.

And then, with the pandemic, it went up to $9 trillion. So, what is all this? This is essentially the Federal Reserve itself entering the market of various speculative assets. The Federal Reserve itself has become essentially an agent to preserve the value of the speculative assets of the various bankers and what have you. And there’s another thing, what’s really interesting insofar as the stock market is supposed to be democratic and so on – allow everybody to make money.

Well, another thing that’s happening, in addition to what you were just saying, is that actually the number of publicly listed companies is shrinking. More and more companies are owned by private equity, which is essentially elite clubs of investors who have inside knowledge about what can turn a profit and what can’t turn a profit. Knowledge which they refuse to make public and so that they can privately, as members of this club, benefit from these lucrative investments and not allow the ordinary investor, the retail investor, to come in.

That’s another really fascinating thing that has been happening. And now, of course, the Trump administration is allowing even greater kinds of forms of club-like behavior. So, the few companies that remain publicly listed, Trump has recently suggested that their reporting responsibilities – they should no longer be held to quarterly reports. They can go down to semi-annual reports once in six months.

So this again restricts the amount of information that is available for the retail investor. In so many ways, the Ponzi character of this system, in which essentially there’s a pecking order in which the rich continue to get rich, while ordinary people have no purchase on the system. And as far as things like pension funds are concerned, they are typically the bodies whose enormous amounts of money that they have forms essential “throw weight” in the financial system. It is used as “throw weight.” But, of course, whenever there is any gain, they gain the least, and whenever there is any loss, they lose the most.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: Could you put that chart up again? I want to show it actually shows a radical unprecedented development of the Federal Reserve. You see at the very beginning of the chart that flat line. Yes, that flat line goes back a century, just as flat as it is then. And that flat line is how central banks all over the world have acted for a century. They intervene to buy and sell government bonds overnight in the short term, simply to affect interest rates up and down.

There is no long-term accumulation. What happened when you had the jump in 2008 that you show, and the jump that continued all the way through that period, is for the first time, the Federal Reserve began to be a huge investor itself. It bought enough stocks and bonds, not only government bonds, but corporate bonds, not only corporate bonds, but junk bonds, to push up their prices.

And so you have an enormous inflow of money not to be spent on goods and services, as you’re taught in school, but to buy stocks and bonds. The Fed creates money to inflate asset prices. It creates money for stocks and bonds and real estate purchases, not for consumer spending at all. This whole idea of Fed money creation that affects consumer prices is just a fiction. When you look at that chart, you realize what they really create money for. And that was revolutionary.

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Michael, one of the things we want to discuss, is exactly what the Trump administration wants out of the Federal Reserve. Trump himself has said such contradictory things. On the one hand, he says that he wants the dollar to be strong and the dollar system to work, etc. And of course, it was expected early on when Trump started announcing his tariffs, that tariffs were going to increase the value of the dollar.

But what you’ve seen here, from the time Trump has taken office, the value of the dollar has gone down consistently. Some say that it has lost some 10% of its value, and this is one chart which shows the ups and downs. And here’s another one, which just shows essentially the broad dollar index, which again reaches a peak in January 2025 and since then has been in decline.

So the dollar has just continued to decline. And of course, everybody who doesn’t like Trump says that it is Trump’s fault. But I think that the situation is much more complicated. Part of the reason the dollar is declining is because of inflation. Now, mind you, tariffs have contributed to inflation, but inflation was going up even before Trump took office. And at the same time, the Federal Reserve finds it very difficult to deal with this inflation because the only way in which the Federal Reserve will permit itself to deal with inflation is by raising interest rates. But if it raises interest rates much more than it has already done, then it is in serious danger of pricking all the asset bubbles, the so-called everything bubble. Again, here is the chart of the federal funds rate going back to 1955. This is the Volcker peak.

But the Federal Reserve can’t do a Volcker anymore because, back then, when Volcker increased interest rates, he didn’t have to worry about asset bubbles, which would burst. Whereas what we see here, for example, is a series of interest rate increases, which were essentially forced on the Federal Reserve because the dollar was going down. So it had to restore the value of the dollar.

So they started increasing interest rates and the moment they went slightly beyond 5%, that triggered all those processes that led to the crash of the North Atlantic financial bubble, so to speak. So it led to the North Atlantic financial crisis. And similarly, we see again here today that we are already at that point of just a little over 5%, which is why, although inflation remains high, the Federal Reserve daren’t raise interest rates more.

Indeed, now what they are doing, in fact, is they are bringing it down. Now, Trump says that the Federal Reserve doesn’t want to decrease interest rates, and that Trump is advocating for decreasing interest rates. But you know what? The Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, and most of the Federal Market Committee would like nothing more than to decrease interest rates because they want asset inflation to continue.

But they have been forced to at least keep interest rates as high as they are, at which they have come over the last two or three years, because inflation is not going away. The Federal Reserve is caught in a bind; that’s why they are keeping up this higher for longer. In a certain sense, I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Trump just wants to look like the person who caused interest rates to decrease and as though they care about the real economy. But, of course, what Jerome Powell, as well as Trump, what they all care about merely, is the continuing inflation of asset bubbles.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right.

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: And then the other thing that I would add to that is that; the independence of the Federal Reserve, which is allegedly in question – Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, recently published this article, in which he criticizes the easy money policies of the past. Now he may want to criticize it, but the fact of the matter is Trump wants the continuation of these easy-money policies.

I think that the real effect, whether it’s intended or otherwise, of interventions like Scott Besant’s – this article is being much talked about – will be essentially to establish that the Federal Reserve has never been truly independent. And if today the Trump administration appears as though it is infringing on the independence of the Federal Reserve, this is no different from what happened in the past. In one sense, that’s true, because all monetary policy is political, and the independence of the Federal Reserve, as we’ve already said, is only to leave the regulation of the financial sector in the hands of the financial sector. So, and that’s a silver political action [Please clarify]. The point is that he is basically establishing a new norm where Federal Reserve policy is political. And I think the only purpose of making it political is to give Trump the credit for keeping interest rates low.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: The article that Besson wrote is really – I’m very happy with it. It’s made wonderful, wonderful points, such as we’ve made for many years. And he called the title of the article: The Fed’s New Gain of Function Monetary Policy. Gain of function is the term that was used for the coronavirus that’s come out and a pandemic. And he’s treating Federal Reserve policy as a pandemic.

And the gain in function has been a mutation of Federal Reserve policy, which we’ve just discussed, in saving the financial debt overhead of the economy, not the economy itself. And he goes to a long discussion of how the effect of making money financially, as you pointed out earlier, the leading financial sector investors are multi-tens of billionaires, and their way of making money is to deindustrialize the economy, not to industrialize it. And I think we’ve shown before the growth of wealth in the economy.

Here’s the wealth of the bottom 50%. The bottom 20% has actually gone down. All of the growth in the wealth of the American economy, all this growth has been in the form of stock, bond, and real estate held by the 10%. It’s the 10% that hold the vast majority, over 75%, of the stock market and the bond market. The 90% people, except maybe via their retirement funds, don’t have bonds and stocks. Only a very minimum compared to the super wealthy. And the beneficiaries of this asset price inflation thus have been the very top of the economic pyramid. And they’ve used this increasing financial wealth to increase their control of the election process by contributing to campaigns.

Now that you’ve deregulated the political campaign contributions in America, as well as the banks, and they’ve essentially bought control. And so the Federal Reserve celebrates this as success. They said, we’ve created wealth, but almost all the wealth they’ve created, 90%, has been to the wealthiest 10%, not for the economy as a whole. And if most wealth takes the form of financial claims on debtors; mortgages, bank loans, corporate bonds, and government bonds, then the creation of wealth on the asset side of the balance sheet means the creation of debt on the liability side of the balance sheet.

And the wealthiest 10% have the assets; the 90% have the debt. And the effect has been to polarize the economy. And I think Besant deserves credit for pointing out that this has been the whole effect of the Federal Reserve asset price inflation. It’s been inequality and unemployment and deindustrialization, the exact opposite of what textbooks imagine; that the financial sector is only an intermediary, it doesn’t have any effect on the economy. It just reflects that it’s the driving shaper of the economy. And it’s been misshaping it all throughout the United States and Europe and the Western economies in general.

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: Let me say that all the truths that Scott Besant has spoken in his article are no different from the truths that Trump had to speak in order to get elected. Remember, it’s been my argument for a long time that Trump discovered one thing, which is that you can no longer win elections by telling people that their economy is doing very well.

He told them the truth; it’s not doing well. We agree with that, but, of course, Trump told them the truth only in order to get elected and, of course, he thenmixed that with lies, for example the fact that he said to them that the economy is not doing well because of trade and because of immigrants and so on. All of those things were, of course, lies, so Trump has just a different package of truth and lies.

In Scott Bessent’s new package of truth and lies, I think the key point you have to understand is that he is only telling the truth about the inequality generated by the Federal Reserve not so that this will put a stop to it, because of course he himself would favor, as his president would favor, lower interest rates. What is going to be the effect of lower interest rates? The effect of lower interest rates will be to further inflate asset bubbles and to postpone the moment of reckoning. Let me just share a really interesting chart that I found. This is a chart of the major asset markets in the United States. You can see here there are equities, residential real estate, treasury securities, commercial real estate, farmland, and so on.

Now, what you see here on this chart is the average annual growth from 1997 to 2004. They are not small but they are not huge. But then you look at the growth just between 2023 Q4 to 2024 Q4. Within just one year, these asset markets, some of them like the equity market and so on, have been growing massively. Whereas all the other asset markets have grown less. And the commercial real estate market has actually shrunk to some extent.

So what is really interesting here is that now, in a sense, a crash will be coming because all these markets are already slowing their growth. The equity market is going up without any support. It’s going up and up, but what is it climbing on? It’s getting high on something else because, as we know, the entire stock market is being taken up by the Magnificent 7 and a few other such stocks. And most of the Magnificent Seven inflation in the prices of the equities has been because of the hype around AI. And it is increasingly dawning on people that the astronomical investments being made in the name of AI are not going to be lucrative. They are already not yielding stuff.

So a crash will be coming. But the point is that, in the meantime, they want to continue to have low interest rates. So Besant might complain about the easy money policy. Maybe they will not engage in quantitative easing and so on. But they will keep interest rates low. The point is that he wants to say that Federal Reserve policy has always been political, and he wants to say, therefore, that we are going to politicize it. And once that happens, then Trump will do what has been done in the past, which is to justify low interest rates in the name of economic growth, when, in fact, he wants low interest rates in order to keep asset prices up.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: I agree. That’s exactly what’s been happening. People act as if the growth of wealth and the growth of the 10% are what the economy is all about. And for the Federal Reserve, that’s what the economy is all about, because that’s its constituency, because the wealthiest 10% are the customers for the bank loans. And the Federal Reserve is created to be managed and run by its member banks. So you have a closed circle.

And as long as Congress remains inactive and is unwilling to do anything except to cut taxes even more, to run an even larger budget deficit that adds to the effect, you can have Trump make the argument that if we don’t lower the interest rate, imagine how much of the government debt’s interest rate – the budget is going to have to be spent on interest to the bondholders.

And this is already almost as large as our military spending. This is going to create a crisis. We’re going to have to cut social security and cut Medicare, but there’s a solution to that because we can privatize social security and put it all into the stock and bond market to keep the Ponzi scheme going.

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: I’m just showing exactly what you’re talking about Michael, which is that the yield on treasuries both one year and 30 years, so very short term and very long term, has been going up and they are now at fairly high rates. This is really, also quite interesting and they are adding to the debt, the deficit, etc., which will continue to grow because the Trump administration is committed to cutting taxes for rich people, etc.

Another point that I just wanted to make, but essentially what is happening now is that the idea that the Federal Reserve should be independent is being buried and now we will have a new type of rhetoric, which will continue the same policies of inflating asset bubbles. They were not going to revive the American economy, just as the tariffs are not going to revive it, nor will low interest rates revive the American economy, as I’ve already said at the beginning.

The insertion of cryptocurrency has simply added a new asset whose value can be inflated, on the basis of which a small number of rich people can make money while the rest of the economy suffers. And this is going to continue.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the real point you’re making: it’s the government that needs to be made independent from the financial sector. That’s the real independence we’re talking about. And that’s the problem. Under America’s two-party system, you can only have two parties. There’s such a tangle of laws that there’s no way of having an alternative to the Republican-Democratic duopoly. And so Congress itself is no more independent than the Federal Reserve is from Wall Street.

And the result has been to shift economic policy, meaning economic planning, to the financial sector. Out of Washington into the financial sectors, Wall Street, and also the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. And so the result of all that is the financialization of the economy and a loss of what used to be the whole dynamic of industrial capitalism and the whole idea of industrial democracy.

If Wall Street’s in control, this means not a market free of government planning and centralization. Financial planning is more centralized than government planning. That’s why Trump’s been firing all of the government regulatory agencies. With no regulatory agencies, there’s nothing to prevent the financial sector from becoming the economy’s central planner. And that’s what’s happened in a nutshell to the US economy

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: So what you’re saying is that we will have a centrally planned economy, except that it will not be planned in the interests of ordinary people, it will be planned in the interests of a small number of very rich people, the Elon Musks of this world. And this is so true. I suppose what we’ve really said is that the rhetoric about the independence of the Federal Reserve has always been a way of keeping Federal Reserve policy away from democratic influence.

The idea being that, of course, as long as you have some kind of democracy then at least you can elect a government which can politically try to control the Federal Reserve, to bend its policy in the direction that will help ordinary people, that will create a productive economy, etc. But, of course, what you’re adding to this is that, of course, the existing democratically elected governments of the last many decades, and still today, are simply themselves in the pockets of the financial sector.

So there’s no way the elected government is going to control the Federal Reserve in a way that will benefit ordinary people. The point is not that the Federal Reserve is not independent, it’s not factually independent anyway. The problem is that it is under the control of the wrong interests. And if ordinary people in the United States want to take control over the destiny of their country, they are going to have to elect a government that is not part of this duopoly, that will actually represent the interests of ordinary people.

And then, yes, there will be no need for an independent Federal Reserve. The government will essentially bend monetary policy. A popularly elected government acting in the popular interest will bend monetary policy in the direction that it needs to go in order to create a productive, equal, socially just economy. And, of course, an ecologically sustainable economy.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: I think you’re quite right. A democracy, unlike an oligarchy, would centralize financial management in the hands of the Treasury, which is a public, elected political agency, not a central bank. The United States didn’t have a central bank until 1913. The problem is that the Treasury itself is mismanaging the economy because it was run by basically bullionists, by gold bugs. And whenever the Treasury would raise a surplus, like for tariffs, the tariffs had to be paid in bullion, gold and silver bullion, not by bank credit.

And there was such an antagonism towards banks in the United States from colonial times, from the beginning of the Republic to the 1880s, with the whole silver, gold crisis, crucified on a cross of gold, that Americans didn’t want the banks to create money. And there was such a shortage of actual credit that an economy needs that, in an act of desperation, the Republicans and Democrats got together and said, we need bank credit. We can’t have these libertarian nuts, bullionists, at the Treasury tie our hands. That was the story of how the Federal Reserve was created in the first place.

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: There was that, but I think there were also some other things. The fact of the matter is that the United States dollar was not acceptable around the world because it didn’t have a central bank, whose function it would be to stabilize the value of the dollar. And of course, in the recent years, in the post-Second World War period, partly because the United States government has been committed to keeping the dollar as the world’s money, what you’ve actually seen is a systematic overvaluation of the U.S. dollar, which has then been a disaster for American industry.

It has been central to the deindustrialization of the United States. But nevertheless, my point is that the Federal Reserve was also necessary because otherwise your currency would never be acceptable. Before the Federal Reserve was created, the international transactions of the American government and other corporations were being handled via JP Morgan and handled in pounds sterling, which was kind of interesting.

There was another thing, which is that when you had banking crises, and there was a big banking crisis in 1907, there was no lender of last resort. So they had to create one. So there were many reasons. But yes, the fact is that you had to create a Federal Reserve in order to perform these functions.

⁣MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, but at least at that time, the lender of resort, when it did lend money to banks to avoid insolvency, it charged a penalty rate. That was the essence of management. And now the Federal Reserve gives a subsidized rate, just the opposite of what happened over a century ago.

⁣RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. Well, Michael, it’s been a wonderful conversation. Unless you have any further things to add, maybe we should wind it up for now. Okay, great. Thanks. Bye.

Pakistan Says Trump’s Gaza Plan Differs From What Arab and Muslim Leaders Approved

As reported …

Islamabad (QNN)- Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said on Tuesday that US President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan is not the same that was approved by leaders of Arab and Muslim countries, including Pakistan.

“This is not our document,” Dar told reporters at a press conference in Islamabad. He explained that Pakistan and its allies had demanded several key points that were missing. “There are some key areas that we want covered … If they are not covered, they will be covered,” he added.

Dar said the immediate priorities remain a ceasefire, stopping the genocide, allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza, and ending forced displacement.

The minister described Trump’s announcement as “an announcement from their side.” He stressed that Pakistan stands by a joint statement signed with seven other Muslim-majority states. “We own this. If there is any difference anywhere, we would go by — we are committed to this,” he said.

Leaders of Türkiye, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, and Indonesia met Trump during the UN General Assembly session in New York. Trump presented his 20-point plan at the meeting.

Dar later told Pakistan’s Geo News that the White House draft “does not include all of our proposals.”

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani also raised concerns. Speaking to Al Jazeera, he said Trump’s plan “achieves a key objective by ending the war, but there are some issues that require clarification and negotiation.”

On Monday, Trump unveiled the plan at the White House alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The proposal calls for the release of all Israeli soldier prisoners in exchange for dozens of Palestinian prisoners, the full disarmament of Hamas and resistance factions, a phased withdrawal of Israeli troops, and the creation of a technocratic, non-partisan Palestinian committee to run Gaza.

The plan mentions Palestinian self-determination as a “possibility,” but stops short of promising statehood.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has already killed more than 66,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, since October 2023. Continuous Israeli airstrikes and ground assaults have destroyed homes, hospitals, and schools. Aid agencies warn that starvation and disease are spreading, making Gaza nearly uninhabitable.

Trump’s Plan Now Includes Key Edits From Netanyahu

This has been the methodology for the past two years. As I said yesterday, these people are all non-agreement capable.

The Gaza deal unveiled Monday reflects major edits pushed through by Netanyahu, infuriating Arab mediators who thought they had a different agreement in place.

While Trump hosted Netanyahu at the White House, Qatari PM Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani was in Doha presenting the plan to Hamas. Hours earlier, Netanyahu had called him to apologize for Israel’s strike in Qatar, a condition for Doha to resume mediation.

Netanyahu secured edits tying IDF withdrawal to Hamas’ disarmament, giving Israel veto power. Even after three phases of withdrawal, Israeli troops will remain in a permanent security perimeter inside Gaza “until Gaza is secure,” which could be potentially indefinite.

Arab states including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Qatar were furious. Doha even urged Trump not to publish the updated text, but the White House released it anyway. To paper over divisions, 8 states issued a joint statement “welcoming” Trump’s role, while withholding full endorsement.

For Palestinians, the plan has some positive elements: no displacement from Gaza, no permanent Israeli occupation, no annexation of the West Bank, a surge in humanitarian aid, and a stated U.S. commitment to restart peace talks and support “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination.”

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas cautiously welcomed Trump’s “efforts to end the war,” a shift from his rejection of Trump’s first-term peace plan.

The plan demands all hostages (alive or deceased) be returned within 72 hours of Israel’s acceptance. But it’s unclear if Netanyahu’s endorsement started that clock.

If Hamas rejects or stalls, the U.S. plan says aid will still flow to “terror-free areas” handed over by Israel to an interim security force.

The bottom line: Netanyahu won key concessions that harden Israel’s leverage, but Arab capitals and Hamas are bristling. Whether the plan holds depends on if regional mediators can pressure Hamas into swallowing terms that strip them of weapons and leverage while leaving Israeli forces dug in.

Elena Panina: Gaza — another “cunning plan” of Trump and Israel

Elena Panina from Russtrat.ru (translated with Telegram)  https://t.me/EvPanina/17424

[Note:  Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan is already morphing to a possible Ukraine solution.  The empirical entity is building a format that they hope to use over and over again.  “The pattern has shifted toward attempts to utilize dwindling economic rights as a wedge for military intervention to expand the hegemonic stake through unrestricted warfare across all domains.”]

There is active promotion of the US administration’s plan for settlement in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu verbally approved it, making a number of amendments.

The most important thing: Trump’s plan does not contain the thesis about the possibility of creating a Palestinian state. It has been replaced with “the Palestinian people’s aspiration” for self-determination. Hamas, by the way, has not yet agreed to the plan. But they will be pressured.

The second important point. After the release of all living hostages and the handing over of all bodies of deceased hostages, the IDF, according to the plan, only reduces the occupation zone of the sector, but does not completely withdraw from it. It is obvious that from this moment Israel, which has already not restrained itself in terms of using all forces and means in Gaza, will receive a full carte blanche for a military solution to the issue.

The third point — the demand for the complete demilitarization of Hamas. In addition, it and other groups must refuse to participate in the governance of Gaza, directly or indirectly. Hamas members who agree to disarmament and “peaceful coexistence” are promised amnesty. They will also have the opportunity to leave the sector through a safe corridor to host countries. Thus, Gaza will lose its armed instrument. And after its complete demilitarization, anything can be done with it.

It is also assumed that temporary governance of the Gaza Strip will be carried out by some technocratic authorities under the supervision of an international body personally headed by Trump. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will also join the council of this body. We are witnessing new forms of colonial governance.

By the way, Trump’s special envoy Stephen Witkoff has already stated the universality of the approach to settlement in Gaza and the potential possibility of its use worldwide:

“This is not only about the Gaza Strip, but also about how this [settlement] can spread to all other regions of the Middle East and what it will lead to. It may even spread to Russia and Ukraine.”

The motto “From directors of Gaza — to director of Ukraine” is directly suggested. And it seems that the council on Ukraine will also include the well-known Victoria Nuland.

It is obvious that Trump’s plan is designed to reduce international pressure on Israel in connection with its policy of genocide in Gaza. The Palestinians will ultimately get nothing. Over time, after disarming Gaza, Israel with the help of the US will carry out its final annexation.

Seven Stages of Grief in Seven Minutes: The Trump Plan for Gaza

Assessing this Trump plan yesterday, I literally went through the seven stages of grief in 7 minutes.  But I did not stay with the final stage, which is acceptance.  There is no acceptance for another naked attempt at managed colonialism after running a genocide to get to this point.  What I accepted is that we are at war. While world leaders have learned the Trump cycle and are furiously pumping the bellows of congratulating him to (please god) get a kind word from him, a meaningless babble, while the rest of the world, the people, understand that we are living through one of the most propagandized, psyop’ed times in history.  These, so sickeningly endorsing, completely forgot that only last week they all supported Statehood for Palestine.

The Trump plan is not an exception, but the cherry on the cake that is being baked with flour ground from the dead bones of the Palestinians, and for this cake, the blood of the Palestinians is being used as liquid, with Tony Blair as the seasoning.  Tony Blair has already formally announced that Gaza (under his watch) will be managed remotely.

As expected and in line with the previous pretend efforts at peace, in recent hours, and in light of a new ceasefire proposal, the IDF has escalated its bombings on the Gaza Strip in the dead of the night.

I will not discuss the plan, as it is here. It is doomed again and has already failed, for these reasons:

One)  Nobody trusts the US.  Trump has lied to us so many times that it would be insane to believe him once again.  We come from two years of false negotiations for peace plans.  This is a non-agreement capable entity that pretends there is agreement on their plan to own West Asia and build on bones.   The western media is ghoulishly dancing to the macabre plan.

Two) Netanyahu has no intention of sticking to it, as he has already announced, speaking in Hebrew at the White House. (Netanyahu has a different schtick when he addresses the US audience, and this changes when he speaks to a local audience.)  So, this plan is already falling apart, despite the desperate business being done in the background by people like the Saudis (a Trump Tower will be built as well as a $1-billion deal to construct a sprawling, “Central Park-inspired” project along the Saudi port city of Jeddah’s Red Sea coastline, signaling the deepening footprint of the US president’s family in the kingdom).
The hope is that Netanyahu could offer Gaza (and the West Bank and the other pieces of land that he has clawed out from Syria, for one) as a small gift to Trump  (He has no bigly airplane to offer, so he provides the Palestinians!).  Trump calls Netanyahu a soldier and a fighter, but neither is accurate.  He is only a killer of humankind, and Trump bakes the cake.

Three) This plan only reveals the real plan, which is to own West Asia, just like all the other places that the Trump administration wants to, and fails to, own.  It is yet again an empirical grab of resources that do not belong to them, under the guise of peace, with a massive land grab at its core.  This will not remain hidden for too long.

There was a joint statement by the Foreign Ministers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt welcoming the leadership role of U.S. President Donald Trump and his sincere efforts to end the war in Gaza, and affirmed their confidence in his ability to find a path to peace.  There is no effective Arab role, and what is included in the “Trump plan” is merely executive roles for implementing the American-Israeli vision. The Arabs are expected only to pressure Hamas and push it toward surrender.

In short: Israel keeps a permanent security perimeter while a foreign body enforces compliance. The message is simple — everyone obeys Israel’s conditions, and then ‘peace’ will follow.

I’ll use this thread throughout the day to report relevant commentary as it comes in.

Qatar and Egypt have delivered the Trump-Gaza peace deal to Hamas, with Hamas currently reviewing it. A trilateral meeting between Qatar, Turkey and Hamas is scheduled for later today once Hamas finishes reviewing the [treachrous] peace plan.

In Hebrew, Netanyahu gave away the game:

The “Gaza Peace Initiative” was another deceptive ruse to paint Hamas as rejectionists

Israel has no intention of withdrawing troops from Gaza, and will not implement any part of the plan in good faith pic.twitter.com/trxMsurbJO

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 30, 2025

China is sticking by the law.  Bear in mind zionist-israel’s acceptance at the UN had conditions and so far, they have not implemented even one.

Trump’s Gaza Plan

Netanyahu apologized to Qatar.  He is being skewered in Israeli media, by both left-wing and right-wing commentators, for apologizing, which most Israelis today see as a Middle East agitator, if not an enemy state.

One commentator noted: “Either this is a very embarrassing act of forced backpedaling, or there is a very serious deal on the table that required this move.”

Deal:

President Donald Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict

Gaza will be a de-radicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.
Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough.

If both sides agree to this proposal, the war will immediately end. Israeli forces will withdraw to the agreed upon line to prepare for a hostage release. During this time, all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment, will be suspended, and battle lines will remain frozen until conditions are met for the complete staged withdrawal.

Within 72 hours of Israel publicly accepting this agreement, all hostages, alive and deceased, will be returned.

Once all hostages are released, Israel will release 250 life sentence prisoners plus 1700 Gazans who were detained after October 7th 2023, including all women and children detained in that context. For every Israeli hostage whose remains are released, Israel will release the remains of 15 deceased Gazans.

Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.

Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip. At a minimum, aid quantities will be consistent with what was included in the January 19, 2025, agreement regarding humanitarian aid, including rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage), rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries, and entry of necessary equipment to remove rubble and open roads.

Entry of distribution and aid in the Gaza Strip will proceed without interference from the two parties through the United Nations and its agencies, and the Red Crescent, in addition to other international institutions not associated in any manner with either party. Opening the Rafah crossing in both directions will be subject to the same mechanism implemented under the January 19, 2025 agreement.

Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee, responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza. This committee will be made up of qualified Palestinians and international experts, with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body, the “Board of Peace,” which will be headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members and heads of State to be announced, including Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

This body will set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020 and the Saudi-French proposal, and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza. This body will call on best international standards to create modern and efficient governance that serves the people of Gaza and is conducive to attracting investment.

A Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East. Many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas have been crafted by well-meaning international groups, and will be considered to synthesize the security and governance frameworks to attract and facilitate these investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope for future Gaza.

A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.

No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.

If Hamas rejects the proposal, or tries to significantly alter it, the plan will be implemented in areas already under IDF control, while Israeli forces continue to battle Hamas in areas still controlled by the terrorists.

All Palestinian Factions have agreed to not have any role in Governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly or in any form

Map of proposed IDF withdrawal from Gaza per the Trump plan.

Blue Line:

The current control line of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)

Yellow Line:

The first withdrawal upon the release of the hostages

Red Line:

The second withdrawal when the international Security Forces (ISF) are deployed according to the standards specified in the Trump plan

Shaded Area:

The third withdrawal, which creates a security buffer zone

Trump continued to say:   Trump hails support for his new Gaza peace plan

Says Arab, Muslim and European leaders called to confirm it’s real — ‘the BIGGEST THING they’ve ever heard’

He describes wide involvement of regional and global powers in backing the proposal

Trump praises Netanyahu as a ‘warrior’ but says Israelis now demand peace and hostage returns

Blasts European allies for ‘foolishly’ recognizing a Palestinian state out of fatigue

Insists no one wants peace more than him — and, he adds, ‘Bibi too’

Netanyahu accepted the plan

Trump: The Arab and Islamic countries, along with Israel, asked “a nice man named Donald Trump” to chair the Peace Council in Gaza, even though my schedule is very busy.

Trump CAN’T believe Israel gave up Gaza in 2005 – ‘They gave up the ocean! Who would do this deal?’ The Don switches seamlessly between real estate pitch and Israeli talking points

Trump says he hopes the US and Iran can “get along”, believes Tehran is open to it, and suggests Iran could eventually join the Abraham Accords.

Netanyahu: We are taking the first step toward ending the war in Gaza and advancing peace in the Middle East.
Netanyahu: We must have all our hostages back, Hamas must be disarmed, and Gaza must be demilitarized.

Netanyahu says if Hamas rejects Trump’s plan, Israel will “finish the job” on its own.

The formal plan has now been published on the White House website.

——

Please give me a moment before I respond. At this moment, this plan privatizes the occupation. There is a scriptural reference that beats in my head. Look at all these things – Bow before me and you can have it all. He failed to take Greenland, he failed to take Canada, he was unable to take the Panama Canal, he allowed Bibi Netanyahu to run a genocide, and now he wants to take the pieces of that and save Netanyahu’s genocidal arse.  We can no longer live with this. But Hamas must accept and fight another day.  This plan is not sustainable as it does not give the Palestinians what they deserve after land, life, and liberty were taken from them.

‼️ Michael Hudson: Note 3 on the planned Alaska meeting

Alaska Breakdown Looming

It looks like Trump has just announced that the Alaska meeting will be hostile and he is rejecting all Russian demands. He has threatened to walk away in the first two minutes if Russia does not agree to a cease fire on Ukraine’s terms. His intention is to threaten Russia with more U.S. blustering that poses no real threat to Russia, but will (he hopes) solidify his support from the Donor Class, CIA and EU Russia-haters.

It is literally impossible for Trump to make any peace deal with Russia. First of all, he cannot control Europe, and Starmer, Macron and Merz have announced that they are going to fight Russia regardless of what Trump might want.

Second, Ukraine’s Azov battalion and related neo-Nazi nationalists insist that they will continue to fight – if not overtly, then by constant sabotage. Ditto the CIA alongside MI6.

And Trump’s neocon coterie is pressing the third rail: ny treaty settlement needs Congressional approval. Trump is no more in charge of Congress than the is of the CIA. It’s they that are running him.

So why is Putin attending, now that the original hints of reasonability by Trump has been summarily rejected, according to the Wednesday afternoon New York Times and WSJ reports of his statements? Trump has reverted to calling Russia the aggressor, as if it rather than Ukraine is bombing civilians. It is clear that he is incorrigible.

The last few days has seen Trump accelerate its military confrontation with Russia. The EU has announced a trillion-euro arms buildup against Russia’s threat to send 10 million troops to occupy it – as if countries still fought by armies occupying enemies instead of just bombing them.

The only way to salvage this meeting is not to talk about Ukraine at all, but about NATO/Russian relations and possible negotiation of a new atomic arms control treaty.

All that I can imagine Putin saying are two things. First of all, of course Russia wants Ukraine at the table to end the war. He hopes that by the end of the year his troops will establish a new Ukrainian government that will be able to sign the armistice, creating a New Ukraine with a new constitution. He’ll tell Trump that he is trying to end the war as quickly as possible.

Putin may bring up Armenia and Azerbaijan and ask the US to withdraw its intrusion, unless he wants a repeat of the Kennedy/Khruschev showdown with Russia putting atomic missiles in Cuba. The sphere-of-influence principle will come up – as it did in the Monroe Doctrine, which promised that the United States would not intervene in European affairs if European kingdoms stayed out of the Western Hemisphere.

Finally, Putin can say that in view of the fact that they can’t agree not to continue the US/NATO attack on Russia (and China and Iran and the entire rest of the world), at least they should agree that even in the absence of an arms treaty, they won’t bomb each other. The United States is free to sell all the arms and missiles it wants to Germany and other bellicose NATO countries. But once these arms are bought by Europe, Russia will treat any attack on its territory (including its extension into former Ukraine) as an attack by the country supplying the arms – and will feel free to bomb the hell out of it.

Putin can quip to Trump that this is the most peace-oriented thing that the United States can do: avoid a direct US/Russian exchange of bombs. “You can have Europe,” Putin can say. “It has nothing that we need or want.” Just leave us alone and stay out of our way, and you’ll have your US-Russia peace.”

It will be interesting to see how Trump depicts this as a great victory.

Russian Foreign Intelligence Service’s (SVR) statement original

Spies and sabotage

I have updated this as it is now available in a formal publication at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The original that came from Tass is below:

Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation: (http://svr.gov.ru/smi/2025/08/britanskie-spetssluzhby-gotovyat-ekologicheskuyu-katastrofu-v-mezhdunarodnykh-vodakh.htm)

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has been receiving reports indicating that the UK intelligence agencies are planning to involve NATO allies to launch a massive raid on the so-called shadow fleet.

London intends to use a resonating incident with one or several tankers for launching this campaign.

This plan provides for a major act of sabotage so that the resulting damage can be used as the pretext for Russia’s oil shipments to be dubbed a threat to international maritime navigation. This would, in turn, give the West a free hand in taking countermeasures. They can go as far as detaining any vessels deemed suspicious in international waters and escorting them to ports in NATO countries.

The Britons are considering the two options as possible casus belli.

• First — staging an accident with an undesirable tanker in a narrow spot along maritime navigation routes, such as in a strait. London believes that an oil spill or the fact that the accident results in blocking the waterway would give NATO countries ‘sufficient grounds’ for creating a precedent to carry out special and extraordinary inspections of vessels in a pretended move to check them for compliance with navigation safety rules and environmental standards.

• Second — setting a tanker on fire while it unloads its cargo at a port of a country friendly to Russia. In this case, the fire is expected to cause serious damage to port infrastructure and to spread to other ships, which would require an international investigation.

London intends to task Ukrainian security services with carrying out these terrorist attacks.

In fact, the UK expects the perpetrators to do the dirty work and to fail at covering up their tracks, which would serve as a safety guarantee for the British. The international investigation would hold Russia responsible for the disaster, while in the worst-case scenario Ukraine will bear the blame, as it happened with the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines.

The UK plans to choose the right moment for the attack so that it creates a ripple effect in the media for pressuring Donald Trump administration to compromise its national interests and forcing Washington to go all out in imposing harsh secondary sanctions on the buyers of Russian energy resources by casting them as having indirectly contributed to this tragedy.

The UK’s intelligence community has totally lost the remnants of any good sense because of the reminiscence for the time when Britain ruled the seas, with the British crown approving pirate lawlessness at sea.

It is high time that our UK colleagues understood that their increasingly brazen attempts not only to ‘spite’ their rivals, but to undermine global energy security and environment can make even their closest allies run out of patience.

ORIGINAL from TASS

The UK’s intelligence services are planning to enlist NATO allies in a large-scale operation targeting the “shadow fleet,” which could lead to an environmental disaster in international waters

According to the plan, a “resonant incident involving one or more tankers” would provide the impetus for such a campaign

The plan involves organizing a major act of sabotage to allow the transportation of Russian oil to be declared a threat to all international shipping, which would give Western countries more freedom in choosing methods of counteraction

The British secret services are working on “two potential casus belli”: one involves staging an “unwanted” tanker accident, such as an oil spill or blocking the fairway, and the second involves setting fire to a tanker while loading in a port of a Russia-friendly state

The UK intends to time the attack so that the resulting media coverage will put pressure on the administration of US President Donald Trump

The goal is to force Washington to impose the most severe secondary sanctions against buyers of Russian energy resources, portraying them as “indirect culprits of the tragedy”

Yarlung Tsangpo Hydroelectric Power Plant : Tibet (Xizang)

The information following is from professional Chinese sources. A Russian discussion on this project follows.

1. Location

• Officially Published:

“The project is located in Mêdog County, Nyingchi City, Tibet (Xizang) Autonomous Region, at the great bend of the lower Yarlung Tsangpo River. It leverages a natural 2,350-meter water drop across just 50 km.”
*(Source: 《中国水电发展”十四五”规划》[China Hydropower Development 14th Five-Year Plan], 2021)*

2. Why China is Building It

• Official Reasons Stated:

Clean Energy Goals: “Critical for achieving China’s carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.”

Energy Security: “Will become the largest clean energy base in China, replacing 90 million tons of coal annually.”

Regional Development: “Key project for the ‘Western China Development Strategy’, boosting Tibet’s economy and ethnic unity.”
(Sources: National Energy Administration (NEA) reports; 《西藏自治区能源发展规划》[Tibet Energy Development Plan])

3. Communities Served

• Per State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC):
Tier Service Area
Primary Tibet (Lhasa, Nyingchi, Shigatse)
National Grid Guangdong, Zhejiang, Sichuan (via ±800kV UHVDC lines)
International* Bangladesh, Myanmar (under discussion)

Note: Cross-border supply requires bilateral agreements.

4. Construction Timeline

• Official Estimate (China Hydropower Engineering Association):

Phase 1 (Pre-construction): 2023–2030 (Feasibility studies, environmental assessments)

Phase 2 (Core Construction): 2030–2040 (First 20 GW operational)

Full Completion: 2045+ (Total 60 GW capacity)

“Complex geology (seismic zone) and ecological sensitivity require extended timelines.”

Key Official Concerns Highlighted

Environmental Protection:

“Strict adherence to 《青藏高原生态屏障保护规划》[Tibetan Plateau Ecological Barrier Protection Plan]; 15% of budget allocated to habitat restoration.”

Geopolitical Sensitivity:

“All construction occurs within China’s undisputed territory; cross-border impacts require dialogue.” (Foreign Ministry Statement, 2023)

Direct Quotes from Chinese Sources

• “雅鲁藏布江下游水电开发是落实国家能源安全新战略的重要举措，装机容量可超6000万千瓦。”

Translation: “The lower Yarlung Tsangpo hydropower development is vital for national energy security, with capacity exceeding 60 GW.”
(Source: National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), 2022)

Official English Translations

China occasionally releases English versions of key policy documents:

《China’s Energy Development Report》 (NEA)

《Tibet’s Green Development White Paper》 (State Council)

China Southern Power Grid reports (partial English editions).

…

The following Russian discussion is by Dmitry Skvortsov, writing for https://vz.ru/world/2025/7/22/1347113.html and titled:

Who is hindered by the creation of a Chinese engineering miracle

China is starting construction of the most expensive project in human history: a series of hydroelectric power plants in Tibet. This project is not only an engineering marvel, but also a crucial element of China’s energy strategy. So why is it facing fierce opposition from other countries?

China has launched the construction of a cascade of hydroelectric power plants in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet. The total amount of planned investments will be 1.2 trillion yuan (167 billion US dollars). This is almost five times more than the cost of the previous Chinese mega – project-the Three Gorges hydroelectric power station (254.2 billion yuan). This estimated cost makes the Yarlung Tsangpo Canyon hydroelectric complex the most expensive project in human history.

The Yarlung Tsangpo River originates in the Tibetan Plateau and, after passing through vast heights and sharp drops, forms a canyon that is deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon in the United States. In the construction area, the river makes a giant loop around Mount Namcha Barwa, creating ideal conditions for the construction of a hydroelectric power plant: a sharp drop in elevation, a powerful flow of water, and a naturally narrow canyon.

Hydroelectric power plant builders do not need to use a dam to create a height difference to provide the necessary water pressure. This avoids the need to flood large areas of land, which is inevitable when building large-capacity hydroelectric power plants in flatter areas.

At the same time, the builders will have to overcome many problems. The terrain is extremely difficult, with elevations exceeding 3,000 meters, frequent landslides and mudflows, and tectonic activity requiring the use of earthquake-resistant technologies. Hydrologically, the river is characterized by high seasonal water levels and large fluctuations in water flow.

The projected installed capacity of the plant exceeds 70 GW, which will make it the largest hydroelectric power plant in the world. It surpasses the largest hydroelectric power plant to date (also in China) Three Gorges Dam by more than three times. Its installed capacity is greater than the combined installed capacity of the three largest hydroelectric power plants on earth: Three Gorges Dam (China – 22.5 GW), Baihetan (China – 16 GW), Itaipu (Brazil/Paraguay – 14 GW). This is more than half of the installed capacity of all power plants in countries such as the UK, Italy, or Spain (120–130 GW).

The project will use the latest technologies for tunnel drilling and earthquake-resistant concrete reinforcement. It will also use the latest flow control systems. The project will also include environmental compensation measures. Special attention will be paid to creating a network of reservoirs and cascades that will ensure even generation during seasonal fluctuations.

The scale of the construction project is unprecedented: tens of thousands of workers, hundreds of kilometers of roads and tunnels, and the construction of airfields and logistics centers.

The choice of location for the construction of hydroelectric power plants is not only due to the topography of the area. The Tibetan region remains one of the least electrified areas in China. The remoteness, rugged terrain, and low population density have hindered the development of the power grid. However, the growth of high-altitude cities, infrastructure projects, and tourist destinations requires a reliable power supply.

Since the late 1990s, China has been developing plans for the comprehensive electrification of Tibet. Since 2000, China has initiated the development of 193 hydropower projects in the region. Approximately 60% of these projects are still in the planning or preparation stages. However, the most ambitious project has been selected, located in the Yarlung Tsangpo Gorge. The construction permit was obtained in December 2024, and the official start of construction took place on July 19, 2025.

This hydroelectric power plant should not only provide electricity to Tibet, but also become an important part of the energy transmission system from the west to the east of China, where most of the industrial consumers are located. The installed capacity of the plant will help cover the evening and night peaks when solar generation decreases and wind generation is unstable.

We should not forget about the large-scale deposits of lithium in Tibet. This production is very energy-intensive and impossible without a stable energy supply. The launch of hydroelectric power plants will give a start to the industrial development of Tibet’s mineral and rare-earth reserves.

In China, which plays the role of the “factory of the world,” coal-fired thermal power plants still play a significant role in the electricity sector (1,150 GW, or 34.3% of the total installed capacity of the country’s electricity generation). However, China is also a leader in the development of renewable energy. The installed capacity of solar power plants currently stands at 887 GW (26.5%), while the installed capacity of wind power plants is 520 GW (15.5%).

However, renewable energy sources are unstable. The recent blackouts in Spain and France, caused by sudden changes in grid load, have highlighted the importance of having managed backup capacity. Hydroelectric power plants are one of the best candidates for this role. Unlike solar and wind power, hydroelectric power plants can quickly adjust their generation to adapt to changes in the grid. The Yarlung Tsangpo Hydroelectric Power Plant will serve as a flexible backup capacity as the share of renewable energy increases, reducing the risk of instability.

The announcement of the construction project has sparked expected opposition from China’s geopolitical adversaries. India and Bangladesh have expressed concerns about the project, fearing that the water may be diverted or held back. The Yarlung Tsangpo River becomes the Brahmaputra River as it flows southward into the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, and then into Bangladesh as the Jamuna River. The closure of the river could have significant implications for millions of people living downstream, according to The Guardian.

“China can always use this water as a weapon by blocking it or diverting it elsewhere,” said Niraj Singh Manhas, an analyst at the Jamestown Foundation.

International environmental organizations have also become more active. They express concern about the state of wildlife in the region, as well as the significant tectonic shifts, severe landslides, and extreme geographical conditions in which the dam is expected to be built.

This hydroelectric power plant is especially important for China today, when the United States is preparing to move from a tariff war with China to blocking its access to energy resources. According to the White House, the upcoming economic negotiations with China will include discussions about the need to stop importing Russian and Iranian oil. Beijing is forced to seriously consider the scenarios of forceful blockades of Chinese maritime imports that have been discussed in some English-language media outlets.

In these circumstances, Russian supplies across the land border are not at risk. However, China’s goal is to prioritize energy supply that is independent of maritime oil imports, not only in the north but also in the south of the country.

‘Concentration camp’: Israel’s planned new city in Rafah, explained

What we know about Israel Katz’s ‘humanitarian city’, how it seeks to realise Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan and what international legal experts think

From Middle East Eye

Israel Katz is calling it a “humanitarian city”, from which Palestinians will be encouraged to “voluntarily emigrate” out of Gaza.

But analysts believe the Israeli defence minister, who unveiled plans this week to confine over two million Palestinians into a small area in southern Gaza, is using distorted language.

Experts in genocide and international law say the “humanitarian city” is more akin to a concentration camp. And any talk of “voluntary emigration”, they told Middle East Eye, should actually be read as forcible displacement.

The proposals are not fringe discussions. They were revealed by Katz, and appear to have the backing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here, we break down what we know about the plan, how it relates to months-long US and Israeli rhetoric of ejecting Palestinians from Gaza, and what the international legal implications are.

What do we know about the ‘humanitarian city’ plan?

Katz said the plan would initially involve the ejection of 600,000 displaced Palestinians currently living in camps and makeshift homes in the al-Mawasi area of southern Gaza to an area in the ruins of Rafah city.

Once they arrive in this new zone, security screenings would take place. They won’t be allowed to leave once they’ve entered, Katz said.

Eventually, the entire civilian population of over two million in Gaza would be confined to this small “city”.

Four aid distribution centres are to be established within the area.

The defence minister initially said that Israeli forces would secure the perimeter of the site, but would not run it. He said Israel was seeking international partners to manage the city.

However, an Israeli official told Haaretz that Israel may run the area “for the time being”.

The official said that Netanyahu thinks that if Israel doesn’t manage the zone in the short term, “no one will volunteer on their own accord to take control over the humanitarian matter, and Hamas will simply continue to rule”.

The source added that the prime minister believed that countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE would then be incentivised to take over Israeli control of the area, “without being considered collaborators with Israel”.

There is no evidence that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or any other country in the region has expressed a desire to be involved in the plans.

Katz said that once concentrated in the new city, Palestinians would be encouraged to “voluntarily” leave the Gaza Strip for other countries, as part of an “emigration plan” he said “will happen”.

He added that Netanyahu was leading efforts to find countries to take in Palestinians from Gaza.

There is not yet a clear indication as to when construction for such a new city would begin, or if it could go ahead without international backing.

Katz envisaged that if conditions permitted, the city would be built during a two-month pause in hostilities. Such a ceasefire is being negotiated between Israel and Hamas, via intermediaries, but is far from being agreed.

What does international law say?

The planned city will violate multiple provisions of international humanitarian law (IHL), according to Eitan Diamond, a Jerusalem-based senior legal expert at the Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre.

He said that in accordance with the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, populations in occupied territories “shall at all times be humanely treated”, and may only exceptionally be placed under assigned residence or internment when there are “imperative reasons of security”.

“A blanket decision to enclose hundreds of thousands of people in a concentration camp or zone clearly falls well outside the lawful exception and would entail an unlawful deprivation of liberty in breach of IHL and of human rights law,” Diamond told Middle East Eye.

The Fourth Geneva Convention also states that mass transfers of people from an occupied territory are prohibited.

‘Third countries that willingly take part in the crime would be complicit in the violation of the law’

– Neve Gordon, Israeli expert on international law

“Compelling residents of the occupied territory to move from their homes to another part of the occupied territory would constitute a prohibited act of forcible transfer,” said Diamond.

In relation to Katz’s “emigration plan”, Diamond added that compelling the population to leave the occupied territory altogether to move to another country “would constitute an act of deportation”.

“Both are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, implicating those responsible in the commission of a war crime.”

He added that when such acts are committed as part of a systematic attack against a civilian population, which appears to be the case in Gaza, it implicates those responsible in the crime against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer.

IHL permits warring parties to temporarily transfer civilian populations for humanitarian reasons, however they must be allowed to return to their homes.

“These are often called ‘safe zones’, ‘safe areas’, ‘buffer zones’, and ‘safe humanitarian zones’,” Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London, told MEE.

“What Katz is proposing is a ‘humanitarian concentration camp’, which is a very different story.”

Diamond said that a warring party cannot move a population to avoid risks being caused by that same warring party. As such, he said, Israel’s plan to displace hundreds of thousands of people into a very tight area could not be characterised as a lawful evacuation.

“On the contrary, such actions would almost certainly amount to an act of ethnic cleansing.”
Is the emigration plan really ‘voluntary’?

The short answer is no.

Katz’s “emigration plan” is a manifestation of US President Donald Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the enclave.

Trump said in February that Washington would “take over” the Gaza Strip and eject the Palestinian population to other countries. In the meantime, the enclave would be turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Katz has been a cheerleader for these plans for months. In March, he announced a new government agency set up to oversee “voluntary departures” in compliance with Trump’s proposal.

‘Concentrating the civilian population in the way Israel proposes is clearly an act of genocide’

– Martin Shaw, sociologist

“The phrase ‘voluntary emigration’ has long been used in Zionist ideology as a euphemism for expelling the Palestinian people from their homeland, including by creating coercive conditions that compel the natives to leave,” Nimer Sultany, a Palestinian academic in public law at Soas University in London, told MEE.

Sultany noted that Katz had long threatened Palestinians with another Nakba, having made such remarks in 2022 before the ongoing war.

The Nakba, or “catastrophe”, refers to the forced displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes in 1948.

“There is nothing voluntary about any emigration scheme that Israel devises in these circumstances,” Martin Shaw, a prominent sociologist and author of several books on the subject of genocide, told MEE.

“The people of Gaza have been bombed out of their homes, lost their loved ones, starved and shot at when they try to get food.

“Israel will be using all this cruelty to force people to leave, and to remove their right to return as they have from previous generations of Palestinians.”

Diamond said that it is well established under IHL that forcible displacements can be brought about by a coercive environment.

“When a party creates conditions that compel people to move to avert conditions that threaten their lives or wellbeing, their decision to move is not a genuine choice,” he said.

“This is no more voluntary than the decision of a person who hands over their wallet to a gun robber saying ‘your money or your life.’”

So far, Israel has failed to find any countries willing to take displaced Palestinians from Gaza.

“Given that Israel’s actions and future plans are blatantly illegal and constitute war crimes, third countries that willingly take part in the crime would be complicit in the violation of the law,” said Gordon.

The UN said on Wednesday that it stood firmly against any such plans to forcibly displace those in Gaza.

How is the ‘city’ being described by experts?

Many legal experts, including one of Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyers, have said the plans are synonymous with concentration camps.

Sultany noted that the plans involve a starving population being “concentrated” into a tiny site and being prevented from leaving.

“In other words, the civilian population has no choice, and they will be placed in a prison or a ghetto that Israel controls,” he stated. “This is the definition of a concentration camp.”

He said that Israel had already concentrated Palestinians in less than 20 percent of Gaza, and imposed conditions on them “that bring about their physical destruction”.

“The evidence that Israel has been committing a genocide is overwhelming,” Sultany said.

Shaw, author of War and Genocide, What is Genocide and Genocide and International Relations, agreed.

“Concentrating the civilian population in the way Israel proposes is clearly an act of genocide,” he said.

He added that Katz’s proposal was designed to “consolidate the results” of Israeli killings over the past 21 months by heading towards “removing the survivors so as to complete the destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza”.

“The destruction of a society is, of course, the very meaning of genocide.”

When life is too fast

Can you think of a time in your life when you really needed one of these?