Unfortunately, most people believe the propaganda about "evil Russia."
It is often truly hard to bear.
I regularly encounter people who wholeheartedly side with Ukraine—fully convinced that Zelensky and Ukraine are the "good guys," the poor victims fighting against the devil Putin and the "empire of evil."
They do not understand that neither the people of Ukraine nor the people of Russia want this war.
They do not understand that only a tiny group of ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful individuals benefits from this war—a ruling class so powerful that it controls Western politicians like puppets, manipulates Western populations at will, and has, among other things, ensured that Europeans have developed a completely irrational Russophobia.
These people are convinced that Russia desperately wanted this war and that neither Putin nor Russia had any reason to invade eastern Ukraine.
These people fail to grasp that Putin’s goal was never to conquer the whole of Ukraine. They are often even convinced that Putin intends to conquer not just Ukraine, but all of Europe.
They believe Ukraine can win this war, citing its duration as proof.
These people have absolutely no understanding of Ukraine or Russia, nor do they have any idea what is actually happening on the battlefield. And, of course, they fail to realize that Putin has not yet captured all the territories he targeted in eastern Ukraine because he is proceeding with great restraint.
These people believe that the Ukrainian people are fighting for their independence and that the "good forces"—the USA and Europe—are supporting the underdog.
They fail to grasp that the USA and Europe are waging war against Russia. They fail to grasp that the West provoked this war and intends to continue it because it seeks to destroy the sovereign nation of Russia.
They fail to grasp that Europe and the USA are ceaselessly provoking Putin and Russia, and that Russia has long had very valid and justified grounds to ...
Probably most people primarily buy the imperialist anti-Soviet, and now anti-Russian propaganda, because they feel loyal to the capitalist-imperialist economic growth system that provides them with more income and purchasing power than for example a peaceoriented and climate-balanced eco-socialist system. Fetishism and alienation as described by Marx.
The Unipolar Era was only Liberal on the surface, in actual fact it was Global Corporatism, aka Global Fascism according to Mussolini. The US also attacked country after country, brutally, either with mass-murderous "sanctions" or else direct military force, conservative estimates put lives lost during the Wars of Terror at north of 2 MILLION - and recent scholarship on deaths caused by the "sanctions" puts those numbers into the shade.
Nor did the USA give the slightest two shits about "Liberal Democratic values" beyond lip service on the pig, this was Imperial expansion, and destruction of nations that refused to bow the knee to the 4th Reich.
John still has his 1950s sunglasses on.
And Russia and China would have been quite OK IF the USA had continued the Post War Order without this 21st C. attempt at violent Total Global Hegemony, the existing order was easy, useful, and the benefits to themselves of the dollar trade outweighed the costs of America's 'Exorbitant Privilege".
But the greedy and corrupt Americans couldn't help themselves. Anymore than Bezos or Musk could ever think - "Hey, maybe I have enough now!".
Watching John was interesting a couple of years ago, now he sounds like your previously rational old uncle who is falling to mental infirmity and believes everything he watches on cable TV.
However, Mearsheimer isn't falling into any mental trap that he wasn't in 50 years ago.
The propaganda then was persuasive and pervasive. "America is the good guys". Coming to grips with that lie, recognizing that it is a lie, and finally admitting it is a lie, was extremely hard for me to do. It took me two decades. The movie "Missing" with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek was influential. It was about the "first 9/11" and the overthrow of the Chile government.
It rattled around in my brain for 5 years before I could understand why it bothered me so much and finally admit to myself that "America is not the good guy". It wasn't the only "trip wire", but the others are too subtle or too complicated to explain.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair
Don't think this doesn't apply to you too. If Mearsheimer's message seems more unreal to you now, why was it that you used to believe in what he was saying?
I came to that realisation - and very hard it was too, as you say - by my late 20s, and certainly knew it very well by the time MI5 came to threaten me in person by my late 30s. That was all decades ago, and I've tried to wake up as many people as I can, with limited - and dangerous - success at first, but has become considerably easier in recent years, for obvious reasons. Cognitive dissonance is increasing in general society, and that is the doorway through which this realisation comes.
So it has little to do with "If Mearsheimer's message seems more unreal to you now" - that part of his assumptions were always shaky to me. I appreciated that he was brave enough to break with the mass enforced consensus over who was to blame for the various conflicts, when they were few indeed who would risk their academic status.
What REALLY disappoints me is that he has not moved on from that position. Everyone else in the alt.media is evolving, as the conditions evolve, but his message is exactly the same, word for word, as it has been for years.
In truth I like him, still, and this is greatly saddening me, there is little worse for any decent educator than seeing someone not using their undoubted potential.
I wrote this message, and others similar in more personal spaces closer to him, not to "put him down", I know for an absolute fact there are entire fields of study he would ream me on. That is not in question. It was in the hope that I might spur in him, if he read it, a self-analysis and update on key topics he could easily chat to any maverick member of the PolSci dept in his college and get a heads up on.
An excellent response to the unreal “realist” Mearsheimer’s explanation. Instead of condemning the neo-cons of the unipolar hegemon, he is putting lipstick on the imperialist pig!
He is still stuck in the zero sum ‘bloc’ security architecture, resulting from the brutal, financialised US empire. Multipolairty does not mean “3 main Powers”…it means multipolairty, depending on international, multilateral laws with a mutual security architecture against the hegemony of the empire!
Stop All Wars! Ban nuclear weapons!
USrael - get out of West Asia!!
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!!!
Bloomberg just dropped another masterclass in financial gaslighting—and their own guest had to shut them down on live television.
Watch the opening seconds. Notice what the anchors are focused on: cheering that WTI paper futures have fallen below $70 and asking if retail gas is heading back to $2.50 a gallon.
This is the exact paper-market grift the D.C. Casino wants you focused on. But as I wrote in The Trigg Ledger, you cannot run an 18-wheeler, a 50-car freight train, or a combine harvester on a paper WTI futures contract.
Even Bloomberg’s guest had to admit the physical reality: it doesn’t matter what the paper crude market does when the Strait of Hormuz is functionally choked (traffic down 85%) and the heavy sour crude our refineries actually need to produce diesel, jet fuel, and heating oil is blocked. You cannot simply force U.S. light sweet shale through complex refineries and expect the same distillate yields.
The result? Record crack spreads. The financial elites and political insiders cash in on the volatility, while their unspoken solution for the rest of us is "demand destruction"—an academic euphemism for letting a physical supply shock crush the middle and lower classes out of their livelihoods until the books balance.
They are trading the working class for paper profits. I pulled the data, the shipping logs, and the physical reality to prove it.
Mearsheimer ignores the Kleptocracy that Putin practices and bases his control of Russia on.
Mearsheimer ignores the same Kleptocracy that has taken control of the United States governing political process.
China has come down on much of the Kleptocracy that was creeping into their governing political process.
I don't understand why Mearsheimer can't get out of his expired 'Liberal' thesis... he needs to reframe his construct to recognize that Kleptocracy is the threat to the World Order (as the Chinese have done)
What the Exorbitant Debts of Nations Have to Do with a Looming Nuclear Holocaust
The governments of the USA, Europe, and all the other nations belonging to the ruling class's empire have been borrowing money from the Federal Reserve, a privately owned central bank, for decades.
The nations can never repay their debts, and presumably, that was never the intention.
But have you ever experienced a bank not demanding payment of money owed?
If we can't repay a loan, the bank takes everything we own—valuables, house, land, etc.—until the loan is paid off.
The Federal Reserve will likely do the same.
The nations and their respective governments are liable with real assets or services that give the Federal Reserve even more power and influence.
Our governments, of course, don't tell us this. Our governments are known to lie to us nonstop; all governments, regardless of party affiliation.
So how do governments repay their debts?
I think they do this in many ways.
First of all, it must be stated that all governments of the so-called Western world are subservient to the Federal Reserve. They obey its every word.
Need an example?
In 2008, the Federal Reserve's fiat money system was—once again—on the verge of collapse. The Federal Reserve itself and the major banks subordinate to it were solely to blame. In a mixture of greed and incompetence, they had brought the system crashing down.
The only right thing to do, and the best thing for everyone, would have been for the entire financial system, and thus the banking empire of the so-called Western world, to collapse.
The Federal Reserve should have been abolished, and its owners should have been held accountable.
Of course, a collapse of the monetary system would have led to temporary inconveniences and upheaval for everyone.
The horror scenarios presented to the public—namely, that everyone would lose all their financial assets and the market economy would be irrevocably destroyed—were completely absurd. It was the familiar, typical fear-mongering of a psychopathic ruling class, designed to lead us into insane solutions that are maximally bad for us and maximally advantageous for the ruling class. In this case that meant, bailing out the banks—the perpetrators, the criminals—with our tax dollars.
The major banks, and especially the owners of the Federal Reserve, possess vast amounts of real wealth.
We don't know exactly which private individuals own the Federal Reserve, nor do we know the extent of their wealth.
However, we do know that it is a small group of individuals whose wealth far exceeds that of Elon Musk or the richest oil sheikh.
The owners of the Federal Reserve are—in all likelihood—by far the richest and most powerful individuals in the world.
We are dealing with an unprecedented inequality of wealth and power!
And this inequality is not based on merit, intelligence, or competence, but on ruthlessness, fraud, theft, blackmail, mass murder, and insatiable greed.
As with any bankruptcy or fraud, this wealth should have been used to pay out the victims.
And we are all ...
As an independent writer I rely on reader support.
I don't use paywalls because I want to make my writing available to everyone, regardless of their financial situation.
However, I do rely on support through paid subscriptions.
If you can afford the 5$ monthly, please support me with a paid subscription.
While the 2008 financial crisis did indeed cause problems for many home buyers, and it did result in a scam perpetrated on US residents, it wasn't orchestrated by the Federal Reserve. The repeal of Glass-Steagall allowed the massive speculation and the fraud of developing unregulated financial instruments. The Fed didn't do this.
The scam of allowing adjustable rate mortgages and those mortgages that start with lower payments but have a balloon adjustment in 5 years (I forget the name) coned a lot of home buyers to take out loans they could not afford. This resulted on a lot of homes being repossessed and a drop in home prices.
I'm not at all saying the Fed isn't a criminal organization. I am saying that it hardly operates the scam all by itself. The US is always placing sanctions on other nations which resulted in the deaths of more than 38M people. (Remember Madeline Albright telling us the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was "worth it").
These sanctions worked when the dollar was the world's reserve currency. (The Fed didn't make that happen) And the Fed wasn't the reason the world plunged into WWII.
SWIFT, which is the agency that made US sanctions work, wasn't developed until 1973.
The deployment of CIPS has nearly destroyed that capacity. Many nations have stopped using SWIFT. When Bessent blathers on and on about the new sanctions he will impose on Iran or Russia, those nations don't care.
I like the analysis provided by Aaron Good backed up with articles from Brian Berletic.
The Oligarchy (which you call the "ruling class") has always been concerned with maintaining their positions of power and prestige. They are very good at installing themselves in positions of power. However, they are made up of many, many factions which make and break alliances with one another. Good explains the tripartite state which includes the criminal organizations which also have influence on the choices the Fed makes.
I like to remind people of Gary Webb's series, "Dark Alliance", on how the CIA was involved in moving cocaine into LA to support the Contra Rebels.
A lot of people blame all of this on "the Jews", but that isn't quite true. If you want to specifically talk about the Jewish Mob and Meyer Lansky, OK. But certainly Norman Finkelstein can't be held accountable.
Fixing the "money thing" is not as simple as getting rid of the Fed. "money" is just this imaginary thing whether it is dollars, Yuan or Gold. It is an abstraction that streamlines barter. It depends on people trusting that it will work. China (and I believe Russia) regulate their currencies much more than the USA. China actually executes Billionaires who commit extreme fraud. Michael Milken, for instance, is still a billionaire.
The circular financing that nVidia is practicing with AI organization appears to me to be yet another fraud. The Fed didn't come up with this scam.
In the end, the only way I see that will fix the money scam is destruction of the Capitalist Oligarchy. We also have to stop believing in this "Democracy" con.
Anyway, you don't have to convince me that the Fed doesn't work for me. But what do you plan on replacing it with. No one seems to have an answer.
I didn't say that the Federal Reserve orchestrated the 2008 banking crisis.
The crisis was caused by the greed and incompetence of the major banks.
But the private individuals who own the Federal Reserve most likely ensured that taxpayers bailed out the banks with their money.
The central point I want to emphasize is that the Federal Reserve is hierarchically superior to nations.
This means that the owners of the Federal Reserve hold an extreme position of power, allowing them to control governments more or less at will.
As I said, governments owe the Federal Reserve gigantic sums that they can never repay.
And who controls the military-industrial complex and the intelligence agencies?
We know it's not the US government.
It's obvious that the people who control money itself—that is, the owners of the Federal Reserve—also control the military-industrial complex and the intelligence apparatus.
I refer to this group of ultra-wealthy individuals as the ruling class.
They function as a kind of supranational government, pulling the strings behind the scenes.
They determine politics. Democracy is staged.
For decades, the ruling class has ensured that we are offered only their puppets to elect.
Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, no US president has dared to question the omnipotence of the military and intelligence apparatus.
The Federal Reserve, the military-industrial complex and the intelligence agencies are the ruling class's most important instruments of power.
You give too much credit to organizations (the banks) rather than the rich Oligarchs who control the banks. Name names. Don't say some nameless organization did some wrong, there's always a real person (or persons) behind the crime.
Everyone seems to have forgotten the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1990s. Neil Bush was one of the directors of Silverado Savings and Loan. Did he go to jail? Did John McCain go to jail? Do you understand why there are no Savings and Loans in the USA now? There are Credit Unions. Is your money safer there?
The "ruling class" is just a different label for the Oligarchy. Oligarchy is much more descriptive and its use is more prevalent among the people who agree with the point you apparently want to make. Your choice to agree on a common vocabulary with Good, Wolff, Hudson, Norton and many others -- or not. Depends on whether or not you want to persuade anyone of anything.
Your entire article is defining positions and labels that talk about the same entities but which create disputes with the people you should be agreeing with.
"The Federal Reserve, the military-industrial complex and the intelligence agencies are the ruling class's most important instruments of power."
Not even close. They are secondary or maybe even tertiary to the power the Oligarchy wields.
You aren't "wrong", but you're missing the real villains. Whether or not that's your goal, I don't know.
Larry Johnson had one good point about CIA Director Ratcliffe’s secret visit to Moscow, which both John and Glenn missed - the C-17.
He could have made the same visit in his Gulfstream V private jet. But the C-17 is better equipped to transport the bodies of CIA agents returned by Moscow.
There has been some chatter about the talks involving horse-trading over Iran. That's entirely plausible - US intelligence asking Russia not to intervene/react over planned attacks in Iran, in exchange for some similar concessions in Ukraine.
The fact that he left after a total of 3-4h on the ground, including the drive to the city and back to the airport, is almost certainly a sign that he got nothing except a polite nyet from the Russians.
Also, there have been photos circulating of the American delegation with their own cars. Maximum paranoia would be another, reasonable explanation for the use of the C-17.
The West's Multi-Century Building of the Fascist Empire...
"I have spent thirty years organizing information, building indexes, and mapping the connective tissue between historical events. I have never compiled a ledger as damning, as heartbreaking, or as morally urgent as this one."
Washington is telling you the Strait of Hormuz is manageable. Wall Street is suppressing paper oil futures because their algorithms require your standard of living to collapse to balance the books.
They call it "demand destruction." I call it a grift.
While WTI crude sits in the $80s, physical diesel crack spreads just blew past $100/barrel. The heavy sour crude taps are dry, the SPR is functionally drained below 300 million barrels, and the defense contractors are cashing in on the volatility. The elites are trading paper derivatives while the working class absorbs a historic physical supply shock.
I just published a deep dive on how this closed-loop casino operates, what the distillate crisis means for your grocery bill by Christmas, and the exact prediction market contracts mispricing the fallout.
Thanks for this interesting substantial dialog. Especially this picture of the multipolar powers. I think we really should start thinking new ideas in international relations that go beyond any great power, but developping relations apart from having power over the other.
Big multinationals that make the laws, exploit people, and line their own pockets, not caring about the environment, the people who work for them, or having to make do with the little the big corporations leave them.
I can do without this kind of liberalism. What good is freedom of speech if it's constantly being restricted, and the top 1%, along with their subservient politicians, couldn't care less?
I'm sick of hearing all these explanations and excuses. Those who are ruining everything need to be stopped, preferably locked up or sent to the moon. They don't deserve to be here. I hope that before it all comes to an end, people will take to the streets and start a revolution against these rich and powerful people.
Recently, NATO has increasingly attacked targets deep inside Russia with cruise missiles, including civilian targets.
From a military-strategic perspective, these attacks make absolutely no sense. They are deliberate provocations.
NATO cannot win this war through conventional means, which means it cannot win it at all. It is relying on escalation, and that is sheer madness because it risks a world war and even a nuclear war.
Russia clearly holds the upper hand on the battlefield. Consequently, Putin faces no absolute necessity to respond to these provocations with a counterstrike. Russia is on the verge of winning the war.
But what happens if NATO refuses to accept defeat and stubbornly persists in refusing to sit at the negotiating table with Putin?
What if it continues its cruise missile attacks deep within Russian territory?
Even Putin, who has shown such restraint so far, will eventually be forced to react and put NATO in its place.
NATO has posed an existential threat to Russia since at least 2014. Putin is, of course, well aware that the decadent, depraved ruling class of the Western world is hell-bent on destroying Russia as a sovereign state and absorbing it into its own empire.
On Russophobia and people's fear of the truth:
Unfortunately, most people believe the propaganda about "evil Russia."
It is often truly hard to bear.
I regularly encounter people who wholeheartedly side with Ukraine—fully convinced that Zelensky and Ukraine are the "good guys," the poor victims fighting against the devil Putin and the "empire of evil."
They do not understand that neither the people of Ukraine nor the people of Russia want this war.
They do not understand that only a tiny group of ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful individuals benefits from this war—a ruling class so powerful that it controls Western politicians like puppets, manipulates Western populations at will, and has, among other things, ensured that Europeans have developed a completely irrational Russophobia.
These people are convinced that Russia desperately wanted this war and that neither Putin nor Russia had any reason to invade eastern Ukraine.
These people fail to grasp that Putin’s goal was never to conquer the whole of Ukraine. They are often even convinced that Putin intends to conquer not just Ukraine, but all of Europe.
They believe Ukraine can win this war, citing its duration as proof.
These people have absolutely no understanding of Ukraine or Russia, nor do they have any idea what is actually happening on the battlefield. And, of course, they fail to realize that Putin has not yet captured all the territories he targeted in eastern Ukraine because he is proceeding with great restraint.
These people believe that the Ukrainian people are fighting for their independence and that the "good forces"—the USA and Europe—are supporting the underdog.
They fail to grasp that the USA and Europe are waging war against Russia. They fail to grasp that the West provoked this war and intends to continue it because it seeks to destroy the sovereign nation of Russia.
They fail to grasp that Europe and the USA are ceaselessly provoking Putin and Russia, and that Russia has long had very valid and justified grounds to ...
Read the full article:
https://truthwillhealyoulea.substack.com/p/on-russophobia-and-peoples-fear-of?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4a0c9v
Probably most people primarily buy the imperialist anti-Soviet, and now anti-Russian propaganda, because they feel loyal to the capitalist-imperialist economic growth system that provides them with more income and purchasing power than for example a peaceoriented and climate-balanced eco-socialist system. Fetishism and alienation as described by Marx.
Not that the imperialist system provides "more", but that it provides at all.
People are easily persuaded that the boogy man is out to get them.
It is hard to imagine getting out of the rut you're in. It is too scary.
He's so past his prime...
The Unipolar Era was only Liberal on the surface, in actual fact it was Global Corporatism, aka Global Fascism according to Mussolini. The US also attacked country after country, brutally, either with mass-murderous "sanctions" or else direct military force, conservative estimates put lives lost during the Wars of Terror at north of 2 MILLION - and recent scholarship on deaths caused by the "sanctions" puts those numbers into the shade.
Nor did the USA give the slightest two shits about "Liberal Democratic values" beyond lip service on the pig, this was Imperial expansion, and destruction of nations that refused to bow the knee to the 4th Reich.
John still has his 1950s sunglasses on.
And Russia and China would have been quite OK IF the USA had continued the Post War Order without this 21st C. attempt at violent Total Global Hegemony, the existing order was easy, useful, and the benefits to themselves of the dollar trade outweighed the costs of America's 'Exorbitant Privilege".
But the greedy and corrupt Americans couldn't help themselves. Anymore than Bezos or Musk could ever think - "Hey, maybe I have enough now!".
Watching John was interesting a couple of years ago, now he sounds like your previously rational old uncle who is falling to mental infirmity and believes everything he watches on cable TV.
The greed is indeed extremely underestimated.
Its a greed feedback system at full resonance.
The central thrust of your comment is right.
However, Mearsheimer isn't falling into any mental trap that he wasn't in 50 years ago.
The propaganda then was persuasive and pervasive. "America is the good guys". Coming to grips with that lie, recognizing that it is a lie, and finally admitting it is a lie, was extremely hard for me to do. It took me two decades. The movie "Missing" with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek was influential. It was about the "first 9/11" and the overthrow of the Chile government.
It rattled around in my brain for 5 years before I could understand why it bothered me so much and finally admit to myself that "America is not the good guy". It wasn't the only "trip wire", but the others are too subtle or too complicated to explain.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair
Don't think this doesn't apply to you too. If Mearsheimer's message seems more unreal to you now, why was it that you used to believe in what he was saying?
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/upton_sinclair_138285?utm_source=share&utm_medium=select
I came to that realisation - and very hard it was too, as you say - by my late 20s, and certainly knew it very well by the time MI5 came to threaten me in person by my late 30s. That was all decades ago, and I've tried to wake up as many people as I can, with limited - and dangerous - success at first, but has become considerably easier in recent years, for obvious reasons. Cognitive dissonance is increasing in general society, and that is the doorway through which this realisation comes.
So it has little to do with "If Mearsheimer's message seems more unreal to you now" - that part of his assumptions were always shaky to me. I appreciated that he was brave enough to break with the mass enforced consensus over who was to blame for the various conflicts, when they were few indeed who would risk their academic status.
What REALLY disappoints me is that he has not moved on from that position. Everyone else in the alt.media is evolving, as the conditions evolve, but his message is exactly the same, word for word, as it has been for years.
In truth I like him, still, and this is greatly saddening me, there is little worse for any decent educator than seeing someone not using their undoubted potential.
I wrote this message, and others similar in more personal spaces closer to him, not to "put him down", I know for an absolute fact there are entire fields of study he would ream me on. That is not in question. It was in the hope that I might spur in him, if he read it, a self-analysis and update on key topics he could easily chat to any maverick member of the PolSci dept in his college and get a heads up on.
An excellent response to the unreal “realist” Mearsheimer’s explanation. Instead of condemning the neo-cons of the unipolar hegemon, he is putting lipstick on the imperialist pig!
He is still stuck in the zero sum ‘bloc’ security architecture, resulting from the brutal, financialised US empire. Multipolairty does not mean “3 main Powers”…it means multipolairty, depending on international, multilateral laws with a mutual security architecture against the hegemony of the empire!
Stop All Wars! Ban nuclear weapons!
USrael - get out of West Asia!!
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!!!
(From Aotearoa NZ ✊🏽)
Bloomberg just dropped another masterclass in financial gaslighting—and their own guest had to shut them down on live television.
Watch the opening seconds. Notice what the anchors are focused on: cheering that WTI paper futures have fallen below $70 and asking if retail gas is heading back to $2.50 a gallon.
This is the exact paper-market grift the D.C. Casino wants you focused on. But as I wrote in The Trigg Ledger, you cannot run an 18-wheeler, a 50-car freight train, or a combine harvester on a paper WTI futures contract.
Even Bloomberg’s guest had to admit the physical reality: it doesn’t matter what the paper crude market does when the Strait of Hormuz is functionally choked (traffic down 85%) and the heavy sour crude our refineries actually need to produce diesel, jet fuel, and heating oil is blocked. You cannot simply force U.S. light sweet shale through complex refineries and expect the same distillate yields.
The result? Record crack spreads. The financial elites and political insiders cash in on the volatility, while their unspoken solution for the rest of us is "demand destruction"—an academic euphemism for letting a physical supply shock crush the middle and lower classes out of their livelihoods until the books balance.
They are trading the working class for paper profits. I pulled the data, the shipping logs, and the physical reality to prove it.
Read the full breakdown here:
👉 https://triggledger.substack.com/p/the-dc-casino-how-trump-and-wall?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=8gc1qf
This was a very educational discussion.
The thought of any country using nuclear weapons in 2026 just seems preposterous to me when diplomatic solutions are easily available if wanted.
Lol. It's the west that has lost both in Iran and and Russia.
The fact that red cliff had to go to Russia made it very clear that the Russians have won and NATO has lost.
You don't send your top person if you were winning.
Mearsheimer ignores the Kleptocracy that Putin practices and bases his control of Russia on.
Mearsheimer ignores the same Kleptocracy that has taken control of the United States governing political process.
China has come down on much of the Kleptocracy that was creeping into their governing political process.
I don't understand why Mearsheimer can't get out of his expired 'Liberal' thesis... he needs to reframe his construct to recognize that Kleptocracy is the threat to the World Order (as the Chinese have done)
What the Exorbitant Debts of Nations Have to Do with a Looming Nuclear Holocaust
The governments of the USA, Europe, and all the other nations belonging to the ruling class's empire have been borrowing money from the Federal Reserve, a privately owned central bank, for decades.
The nations can never repay their debts, and presumably, that was never the intention.
But have you ever experienced a bank not demanding payment of money owed?
If we can't repay a loan, the bank takes everything we own—valuables, house, land, etc.—until the loan is paid off.
The Federal Reserve will likely do the same.
The nations and their respective governments are liable with real assets or services that give the Federal Reserve even more power and influence.
Our governments, of course, don't tell us this. Our governments are known to lie to us nonstop; all governments, regardless of party affiliation.
So how do governments repay their debts?
I think they do this in many ways.
First of all, it must be stated that all governments of the so-called Western world are subservient to the Federal Reserve. They obey its every word.
Need an example?
In 2008, the Federal Reserve's fiat money system was—once again—on the verge of collapse. The Federal Reserve itself and the major banks subordinate to it were solely to blame. In a mixture of greed and incompetence, they had brought the system crashing down.
The only right thing to do, and the best thing for everyone, would have been for the entire financial system, and thus the banking empire of the so-called Western world, to collapse.
The Federal Reserve should have been abolished, and its owners should have been held accountable.
Of course, a collapse of the monetary system would have led to temporary inconveniences and upheaval for everyone.
The horror scenarios presented to the public—namely, that everyone would lose all their financial assets and the market economy would be irrevocably destroyed—were completely absurd. It was the familiar, typical fear-mongering of a psychopathic ruling class, designed to lead us into insane solutions that are maximally bad for us and maximally advantageous for the ruling class. In this case that meant, bailing out the banks—the perpetrators, the criminals—with our tax dollars.
The major banks, and especially the owners of the Federal Reserve, possess vast amounts of real wealth.
We don't know exactly which private individuals own the Federal Reserve, nor do we know the extent of their wealth.
However, we do know that it is a small group of individuals whose wealth far exceeds that of Elon Musk or the richest oil sheikh.
The owners of the Federal Reserve are—in all likelihood—by far the richest and most powerful individuals in the world.
We are dealing with an unprecedented inequality of wealth and power!
And this inequality is not based on merit, intelligence, or competence, but on ruthlessness, fraud, theft, blackmail, mass murder, and insatiable greed.
As with any bankruptcy or fraud, this wealth should have been used to pay out the victims.
And we are all ...
As an independent writer I rely on reader support.
I don't use paywalls because I want to make my writing available to everyone, regardless of their financial situation.
However, I do rely on support through paid subscriptions.
If you can afford the 5$ monthly, please support me with a paid subscription.
Thank you for your support.
Read the full article:
https://truthwillhealyoulea.substack.com/p/what-the-exorbitant-debts-of-nations?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4a0c9v
While the 2008 financial crisis did indeed cause problems for many home buyers, and it did result in a scam perpetrated on US residents, it wasn't orchestrated by the Federal Reserve. The repeal of Glass-Steagall allowed the massive speculation and the fraud of developing unregulated financial instruments. The Fed didn't do this.
The scam of allowing adjustable rate mortgages and those mortgages that start with lower payments but have a balloon adjustment in 5 years (I forget the name) coned a lot of home buyers to take out loans they could not afford. This resulted on a lot of homes being repossessed and a drop in home prices.
I'm not at all saying the Fed isn't a criminal organization. I am saying that it hardly operates the scam all by itself. The US is always placing sanctions on other nations which resulted in the deaths of more than 38M people. (Remember Madeline Albright telling us the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was "worth it").
These sanctions worked when the dollar was the world's reserve currency. (The Fed didn't make that happen) And the Fed wasn't the reason the world plunged into WWII.
SWIFT, which is the agency that made US sanctions work, wasn't developed until 1973.
The deployment of CIPS has nearly destroyed that capacity. Many nations have stopped using SWIFT. When Bessent blathers on and on about the new sanctions he will impose on Iran or Russia, those nations don't care.
I like the analysis provided by Aaron Good backed up with articles from Brian Berletic.
The Oligarchy (which you call the "ruling class") has always been concerned with maintaining their positions of power and prestige. They are very good at installing themselves in positions of power. However, they are made up of many, many factions which make and break alliances with one another. Good explains the tripartite state which includes the criminal organizations which also have influence on the choices the Fed makes.
I like to remind people of Gary Webb's series, "Dark Alliance", on how the CIA was involved in moving cocaine into LA to support the Contra Rebels.
A lot of people blame all of this on "the Jews", but that isn't quite true. If you want to specifically talk about the Jewish Mob and Meyer Lansky, OK. But certainly Norman Finkelstein can't be held accountable.
Fixing the "money thing" is not as simple as getting rid of the Fed. "money" is just this imaginary thing whether it is dollars, Yuan or Gold. It is an abstraction that streamlines barter. It depends on people trusting that it will work. China (and I believe Russia) regulate their currencies much more than the USA. China actually executes Billionaires who commit extreme fraud. Michael Milken, for instance, is still a billionaire.
The circular financing that nVidia is practicing with AI organization appears to me to be yet another fraud. The Fed didn't come up with this scam.
In the end, the only way I see that will fix the money scam is destruction of the Capitalist Oligarchy. We also have to stop believing in this "Democracy" con.
Anyway, you don't have to convince me that the Fed doesn't work for me. But what do you plan on replacing it with. No one seems to have an answer.
Thanks for your feedback.
I didn't say that the Federal Reserve orchestrated the 2008 banking crisis.
The crisis was caused by the greed and incompetence of the major banks.
But the private individuals who own the Federal Reserve most likely ensured that taxpayers bailed out the banks with their money.
The central point I want to emphasize is that the Federal Reserve is hierarchically superior to nations.
This means that the owners of the Federal Reserve hold an extreme position of power, allowing them to control governments more or less at will.
As I said, governments owe the Federal Reserve gigantic sums that they can never repay.
And who controls the military-industrial complex and the intelligence agencies?
We know it's not the US government.
It's obvious that the people who control money itself—that is, the owners of the Federal Reserve—also control the military-industrial complex and the intelligence apparatus.
I refer to this group of ultra-wealthy individuals as the ruling class.
They function as a kind of supranational government, pulling the strings behind the scenes.
They determine politics. Democracy is staged.
For decades, the ruling class has ensured that we are offered only their puppets to elect.
Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, no US president has dared to question the omnipotence of the military and intelligence apparatus.
The Federal Reserve, the military-industrial complex and the intelligence agencies are the ruling class's most important instruments of power.
You give too much credit to organizations (the banks) rather than the rich Oligarchs who control the banks. Name names. Don't say some nameless organization did some wrong, there's always a real person (or persons) behind the crime.
Everyone seems to have forgotten the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1990s. Neil Bush was one of the directors of Silverado Savings and Loan. Did he go to jail? Did John McCain go to jail? Do you understand why there are no Savings and Loans in the USA now? There are Credit Unions. Is your money safer there?
The "ruling class" is just a different label for the Oligarchy. Oligarchy is much more descriptive and its use is more prevalent among the people who agree with the point you apparently want to make. Your choice to agree on a common vocabulary with Good, Wolff, Hudson, Norton and many others -- or not. Depends on whether or not you want to persuade anyone of anything.
Your entire article is defining positions and labels that talk about the same entities but which create disputes with the people you should be agreeing with.
"The Federal Reserve, the military-industrial complex and the intelligence agencies are the ruling class's most important instruments of power."
Not even close. They are secondary or maybe even tertiary to the power the Oligarchy wields.
You aren't "wrong", but you're missing the real villains. Whether or not that's your goal, I don't know.
Please talk to Rutte. He desperately needs healthy insights instead of this warmongering.
It’s a combination of greed and a superior attitude. This applies to Trump but he is also a racist to individuals and nations.
Larry Johnson had one good point about CIA Director Ratcliffe’s secret visit to Moscow, which both John and Glenn missed - the C-17.
He could have made the same visit in his Gulfstream V private jet. But the C-17 is better equipped to transport the bodies of CIA agents returned by Moscow.
Another analyst said that CIA casualties from Persian Gulf were handed back to red cliff, who knows?!
There has been some chatter about the talks involving horse-trading over Iran. That's entirely plausible - US intelligence asking Russia not to intervene/react over planned attacks in Iran, in exchange for some similar concessions in Ukraine.
The fact that he left after a total of 3-4h on the ground, including the drive to the city and back to the airport, is almost certainly a sign that he got nothing except a polite nyet from the Russians.
Also, there have been photos circulating of the American delegation with their own cars. Maximum paranoia would be another, reasonable explanation for the use of the C-17.
The West's Multi-Century Building of the Fascist Empire...
"I have spent thirty years organizing information, building indexes, and mapping the connective tissue between historical events. I have never compiled a ledger as damning, as heartbreaking, or as morally urgent as this one."
https://griobhtha1.substack.com/p/hemisphere-of-plunder-foreward-or
Washington is telling you the Strait of Hormuz is manageable. Wall Street is suppressing paper oil futures because their algorithms require your standard of living to collapse to balance the books.
They call it "demand destruction." I call it a grift.
While WTI crude sits in the $80s, physical diesel crack spreads just blew past $100/barrel. The heavy sour crude taps are dry, the SPR is functionally drained below 300 million barrels, and the defense contractors are cashing in on the volatility. The elites are trading paper derivatives while the working class absorbs a historic physical supply shock.
I just published a deep dive on how this closed-loop casino operates, what the distillate crisis means for your grocery bill by Christmas, and the exact prediction market contracts mispricing the fallout.
Read the full D.C. Casino breakdown here:
https://triggledger.substack.com/p/the-dc-casino-how-trump-and-wall?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=8gc1qf
Thanks for this interesting substantial dialog. Especially this picture of the multipolar powers. I think we really should start thinking new ideas in international relations that go beyond any great power, but developping relations apart from having power over the other.
What is liberalism?
Big multinationals that make the laws, exploit people, and line their own pockets, not caring about the environment, the people who work for them, or having to make do with the little the big corporations leave them.
I can do without this kind of liberalism. What good is freedom of speech if it's constantly being restricted, and the top 1%, along with their subservient politicians, couldn't care less?
I'm sick of hearing all these explanations and excuses. Those who are ruining everything need to be stopped, preferably locked up or sent to the moon. They don't deserve to be here. I hope that before it all comes to an end, people will take to the streets and start a revolution against these rich and powerful people.
Enough is enough.
Recently, NATO has increasingly attacked targets deep inside Russia with cruise missiles, including civilian targets.
From a military-strategic perspective, these attacks make absolutely no sense. They are deliberate provocations.
NATO cannot win this war through conventional means, which means it cannot win it at all. It is relying on escalation, and that is sheer madness because it risks a world war and even a nuclear war.
Russia clearly holds the upper hand on the battlefield. Consequently, Putin faces no absolute necessity to respond to these provocations with a counterstrike. Russia is on the verge of winning the war.
But what happens if NATO refuses to accept defeat and stubbornly persists in refusing to sit at the negotiating table with Putin?
What if it continues its cruise missile attacks deep within Russian territory?
Even Putin, who has shown such restraint so far, will eventually be forced to react and put NATO in its place.
NATO has posed an existential threat to Russia since at least 2014. Putin is, of course, well aware that the decadent, depraved ruling class of the Western world is hell-bent on destroying Russia as a sovereign state and absorbing it into its own empire.