Why do Europe’s leaders want to turn our beautiful lands into a giant military camp cum prison colony, administered by printing press bankers? The trade is almost as bad as the one the Lenape made, trading the island of Manhattan for glass beads.

Giorgia Meloni and Elon Musk together in New York on Monday night.
FILIPPO ATTILI/US PALAZZO CHIGI PRESS OFFICE HANDOUT

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni was feted recently at a swanky event in New York City held by the Atlantic Council.

I couldn’t get the lingering smell of rotting fish out of my nostrils for a few days after that. The Atlantic Council is the “NGO” par excellence when it comes to US foreign policy. According to the US Library of Congress, the Atlantic Council is:

> “…..a think tank in the field of international affairs. Founded in 1961, it provides a forum for international political, business, and intellectual leaders. It manages ten regional centers and functional programs related to international security and global economic prosperity. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C. It is a member of the Atlantic Treaty Association.”

It’s a very serious operation, and its funders read like a who’s who of very powerful global interests. Here is a small sample of their donors:

• British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
• Embassy of the United Arab Emirates
• Facebook
• Goldman Sachs & Co.
• The Rockefeller Foundation
• Abu Dhabi National Oil Company
• Airbus
• Chevron Corporation
• Google
• HSBC Holdings P.L.C.
• JPMorgan Chase Foundation
• Palantir
• Raytheon Company (now, Raytheon Technologies)
• US State Department
• Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs
• Army Future Studies Group
• Blackstone
• Burisma
• Embassy of Bahrain to the United States
• Embassy of Japan to the United States
• Eni SpA
• Lockheed Martin Corporation
• NATO Public Diplomacy Division
• NATO StratCom Center of Excellence
• Open Society Foundations
• etc.

Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Tech, weapons manufacturers, various governments and various government entities….they are all represented in this so-called “non-governmental organization” that is devoted to Atlanticism (read: continued US global hegemony).

Some of you may be thinking “so what? Italy is firmly within the Atlanticist orbit, and Meloni, as Premier of Italy, needs to represent her country at these events”.

Fair enough. On the other hand, many of you will recall that the Atlantic Council played a central role in the censorship regime forced onto/aided by Big Tech in the run up to the 2020 US Presidential Election, effectively tipping the scale in favour of Joe Biden’s candidacy. In 2018, the Atlantic Council partnered up with Facebook’s parent company Meta to create what is known as the Digital Forensic Research Lab. All of you here are aware that the US Government during Joe Biden’s administration funded efforts that resulted in government-backed calls for social media bans for certain American citizens, with many of the requests succeeding. You also already know the role that the USGov played in shaping the narratives around COVID-19, efforts that were assisted by the Digital Forensic Research Lab.

All of you should be aware that this outfit worked on behalf of government to monitor and censor online speech:

> The SIO’s role in monitoring and censoring online speech has garnered widespread political and legal scrutiny for stifling protected speech in conjunction with the federal government. The SIO-led so-called Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), composed of the University of Washington, Graphika Inc., and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), silenced anti-mainstream narratives at the height of the 2020 presidential race in blatant disregard of the First Amendment. > > Emails from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reveal that the federal agency secretly collaborated with the EIP to censor vast amounts of speech deemed “threatening” and “dangerous” to its agenda. Journalist Matt Taibbi’s reporting detailed Stanford’s abandonment of free expression, open discourse, and intellectual diversity as it aided CISA in an unprecedented crackdown against political topics damaging to Democrats and the pro-lockdown left.

By now, some of you may be wondering why X owner Elon Musk would attend an event hosted by an organization that runs counter to his stated principles at X. I don’t have an answer to this, as Musk’s motivations are his own, and super billionaires reside in a different universe than us mere mortals. In my opinion, it’s not a good look….but my opinion does not appear on Elon’s radar.

My concerns here are focused on Giorgia Meloni, a populist who heads a party founded by neo-fascists, but who is now being celebrated by the powers-that-be, including those who seek to censor information on subjects such as mass migration, an issue where Meloni is supposed to be at complete odds with Atlanticism. What exactly is she trying to achieve here? Her flirtations with Brussels (the EU is firmly aligned with the Atlantic Council) resulted in her being spurned and publicly humiliated. So what gives?****

Thomas Fazi

**approaches the subject from the view of economics and Italy’s dissipating national sovereignty**:

> Taken together, then, you get the sense that Meloni gambled her political survival on shedding her populist image and rushing in the opposite direction, becoming more pro-European and more pro-American than your average European centrist. Now, however, the liberal media is aflame once more. Chatter about Meloni’s political journey started in September, when she was presented with a “Global Citizen Award” at the Atlantic Council in New York. Beyond the think tank’s Atlanticist flavour, what really got politicos talking was who gave Meloni her prize: one Elon Musk. This has fuelled speculation about a potential political (re)alignment with Trump on Meloni’s part. Given the mercurial South African’s financial and political support for Trump’s presidential run — and the (denied) allegations of a burgeoning romance between the businessman and the Prime Minister — these claims don’t feel completely fanciful.

Okay, no big deal so far. Not playing favourites in a foreign election is common sense.

Here’s where Fazi gets to his core argument:

> So could Meloni’s recent moves be signalling a return to her radical roots? I think not. At its core, rather, this story is less about policy — and more about cold hard cash, both in Italy itself and further afield. That’s clear enough if you put aside the trees, Meloni and Musk, and instead focus on the woods: the Atlantic Council that offered Meloni her prize. The think tank euphemistically describes itself as a nonpartisan organisation that “galvanises” US global leadership and encourages engagement with its friends and allies. In plain English, that means that the Atlantic Council exists to promote the interests of US corporations — and American imperial interests more generally. Founded in the Sixties, to boost political support for Nato, today it remains active on transatlantic security issues. 

The meat:

> Nor is Musk the only US investor ingratiating himself with Meloni. After returning from her bash in New York, she also met with Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company. With assets worth $10 trillion, the firm boasts the equivalent of Germany and Japan’s combined GDP. In Italy itself, BlackRock is comfortably the largest foreign institutional investor on the Milan Stock Exchange, owning substantial stakes in some of the country’s largest listed companies. The firm is bolstering its Italian presence elsewhere too. Earlier this year, for instance, Meloni oversaw the sale of Tim’s entire fixed-line network to KKR, a US fund that boasts BlackRock among its main institutional investors.  > > Beyond the fact that the network represents a strategic national asset, with its sensitive user data now effectively under foreign control, these varied moves represent the culmination of a long sequence of privatisations and selling-off of Italian public and private assets beginning back in the Nineties. Once you dovetail that with BlackRock’s future plans — among other things, it hopes to snatch up Italy’s highway and railway networks, currently under public or semi-public control — the country looks set to become little more than an outpost of American capital, losing what little is left of its economic sovereignty. 

Fazi makes the point that by Meloni selling off Italy’s economic crown jewels to US corporate, security, and financial interests, she is reducing her own country to the state of an economic dependency of the USA. Smart Europeans are worried about the continent’s economic decline, and there are strong calls for a strategy to create “European giants” in all economic sectors. By selling off such assets to the Americans, these efforts are instantly handicapped.

Italy as the USA’s “economic Trojan Horse”:

> That this should be happening under a nominally “sovereigntist” prime minister is remarkable enough — but what really matters is the way US investors, notably BlackRock, are using Italy as a Trojan horse to expand their influence right across Europe. Consider the example of Germany. Unlike other countries, companies in Munich or Hamburg largely remain in the hands of the families that founded them. Local investors have substantial influence too, as does KFW, the public bank dedicated to supporting the Federal Republic’s industrial development. > > In practice, that means the penetration of BlackRock and other US mega-funds in the German economy remains relatively marginal. That’s an anomaly that US capital now seems intent on fixing, using Italy as its battering ram. Last month, for instance, Milan’s UniCredit bank announced a surprise hostile takeover of Commerzbank, effectively becoming the Frankfurt outfit’s largest shareholder. Though this caused some patriotic fervour among Italian commentators — an Italian bank taking over a German rival! — the reality is that the move was likely spearheaded by BlackRock itself, which executed the move with the help of other Anglo-American funds, all to consolidate its control of Germany’s financial system. No wonder Larry Fink welcomed the move. “Europe,” he said, “needs a stronger capital markets system and a more unified banking system.” 

For obvious reasons, I don’t find the following quote by Todd to be entirely correct, but the gist of it certainly holds true:

> What we are witnessing, in short, is the economic cannibalisation of Europe by US capital. Not that we should be surprised. As Emmanuel Todd, a French historian, writes in his latest book: “As its power diminishes worldwide, the American system ultimately ends up burdening its protectorates more and more, as they remain the last bases of its power.” With European industry crucial to US interests, Todd continues, we should expect more “systemic exploitation” of Rome and Berlin from the imperial centre in Washington. The fact that this is happening under the auspices of a self-described “patriot” like Meloni only highlights the grotesque weakness of European politics.

No matter who moves into the White House in January of next year, Europe is going to be negatively affected by policies emanating from the ravenous US of A.

It’s well worth a look. Here it is.

Canada makes the list on both sides. Canadians are number ten in both average and median wealth. The difference between average and median wealth astonishes me. In Canada, average wealth is $375K but median wealth is just $142K. That’s a ratio of about 2.5 to 1. I wondered about the inequality in Canada, as Denmark shows $449K and $194K, significantly closer to 2:1. Australia does reach a disparity of just 2:1.

But the situation in the US situation is far worse, their median wealth doesn’t even make the chart, despite being 4th with avarage wealth of $565K, well-ahead of Canada.

The US economy has basically become oligarchical, with a small coterie of well-heeled multi-millionaires and billionaires riding rough shod over everyone else.

We no longer even let our farmers work properly or earn a good living (anyone who thinks farmers live high on the hog have never worked a farm).

In the comments Peter Pan notes:

I think the responses would be quite different if every participant in the poll was made aware and took account of the demographic cliff facing many of their nations. I grant however that in the short run things are still standing due to the termites holding hands.

The demographic cliff is an illusion, modern economies need far fewer people and will need still fewer workers in the future. Deflation in hyper-inflated housing would help young families.

The only exception is if your country is planning to go to way. In which case, you need more soldiers and more mothers. Much better for the armed forces if the soldiers are native stock and not recent additions (barbarian mercenaries). Rome found about this the hard way.

Photo credit: Ansel Adams

[fvplayer id=”46″]

Here’s Tsarev’s essay in English (original in Russian).

A slave does not seek freedom. A slave seeks a good master.

This is not said out loud, but what you see in the video is the basis – the foundation of Ukrainian separatism. That’s what 90% of the Ukrainian population thinks.

“When they start building skyscrapers in Russia like in Dubai, when they start giving away 100 million dollars (?!), when Russia starts blossoming and smelling, then we will turn around and ask ourselves: look, they have so much money, nowhere to spend it, in that case we won’t need independence either”.

After perestroika in Ukraine they decided that Russia was no longer their big brother. Then the time passed. Russia has risen from its knees, but the myth has remained: the Ukraine must look for a new master. The best is the USA, but Europe will do. Think about why Ukrainians are being told stories that they will be accepted into the EU and that they will live like Europeans, while Russian soldiers are stealing toilets and washing machines. It’s exactly this which underlies the real ideology of the Ukraine. Bandera and the like are only outward attributes. Truly it is a desire for a better life. They are fighting to live like in Europe, not like in Russia.

You know, I have been writing for eight years about the need to deal with Donbass. If the efforts that are now being made to make life better in the Donbass had been made earlier, the SMO would not have been needed. Donbass has been a grey area for eight years, with all its consequences. In Ukraine, Donbass has been turned into a scarecrow for the Russian-speaking regions: If you want to live like Donbass, support Russia.

Why do I often write about the economy, the Central Bank and corruption? Because if, to repeat after the Ukrainian in the video, if Russia was like Dubai, the SMO would not be needed. All the former republics of the Soviet Union, and possibly some of the former territories of the Russian Empire in Europe, would have voluntarily joined the alliance with Russia. And there were all preconditions to make life better. Russia, unlike the UAE, is not a desert. The biggest territory, the richest in natural resources, populated by intelligent, hard-working people.

Russians deserve to live better. Then there won’t be a need for wars either.

It’s darkly amusing that in Tsarev’s video source, the Ukrainian everyman insists that the Russian State should be handing out $100 million to each citizen. This is typical of the unrealistic expectations of Ukrainians. They seem to have watched The Wizard of Oz way too many times – “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”. Someday, someone will have to break it to them, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There’s hard work (to get you off the ground) and good timing/luck (to carry you higher) in an environment where those attributes are rewarded. Most citizens are not millionaires. To fall into the top 10% richest families in Canada required just an annual income of CAD$200,000 in 2022.

Still Tsarev is on to something here. Grozny was rebuilt as a model city and Tsetchens are among the most patriotic citizens of the Russian Federation.

Tsarev exaggerates the difference between life in Russia and life in Europe. Palaces in Spain are in a song, Europe is also vast and varied. But yes, the general standard of living in Northern Europe is quite high. We face huge issues in Europe as well, particularly since the Covid-19 lockdowns and new energy crisis. Small companies are closing their doors, more and more Europeans are dependent on multinationals, economic inequality increases with each year. The rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer. The statistics here don’t lie about the division of income.

In the face of heavy economic headwinds, the last thing the Ukraine needed, or Europe needed or Russia needed was a war in Ukraine. There’s only two beneficiaries to this conflict: the United States and the UK. The USA has the opportunity to ruin its competitors (Europe, Russia) at the cost of a state which is of no value to the USA (Ukraine) or even negative value (if the Ukraine rejoined Russia in a common Russian World). The UK has the opportunity to demonstrate its value to its major trading partner (the USA) and to show off its underused assets (espionage and sabotage), potentially acquiring effective control over part of Europe, despite leaving the EU.

What’s interesting here is that Russia may yet come out ahead in this economic footrace to win Ukraine’s heart via quality of life. With the economic disruption taking place in the EU and the internal boom in Russia from increased economic activity to cover sanctions, Russia may offer more opportunities for economic improvement than any other near neighbour. The EU cannot keep the Ukraine waiting like a bride at the altar forever. The only way the EU could hold Ukraine’s heart would be to break all its own internal rules and admit the Ukraine as a full member, which the EU cannot afford to do. The USA only has money for war, not for rebuilding. What money is spent on rebuilding is spent with US firms and in crooked contracts.

Both China and Russia have invested enormously in infrastructure in the last ten years and both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin intend to continue on that path.

The Moscow skyline is unrecognisable in the good sense. Very sensibly the skyscrapers are restricted to a single district, just outside the centre of the city as in Paris (La Défense). When the Russian New Territories (that’s what the Russian are calling Kherson, Zaporozhe, Donbass and Luhansk regions collectively) gleam and their citizens live in attractive homes with low unemployment, the path back to Ukraine’s natural economic partner and native cultural space will look a great deal attractive.

Something similar has already happened in Crimea. Crimea generally and Sevastopol in particular have enjoyed a huge investment in its communal infrastructure since rejoining the Russian Federation in 2014. No one in Crimea would even consider going back to the stagnation which their region suffered under Ukrainian administration.

Russia’s best move is to make the same thing happen in the New Territories. It would suit transplanted Ukrainians like Tsarev just fine. Like any Ukrainian (or anyone else), Oleg Tsarev would love to live surrounded by plenty in a prosperous city.

Photo of Grozny by Timur Agirov via Russia Trek. Photo of Moscow skyline by Deensel.

Of course he sold that car by the time I was nine. There was a market for it in Toronto, where we had moved for his work and to be closer to his parents and my grandparents. The market was the heir to a small fortune for his first car at seventeen. He wanted to make a statement with the roar of the V8 under the hood and the gorgeous sky blue metallic paint.

My father was able to sell the car for not a lot less than he paid for it.

With my father we were reminiscing about cars, as we’ve just changed cars as our otherwise delightful Sharan has run out of road without a full refitting.

The Cougar XR7 was an extraordinary car. My father wondered what it would be worth in 2023, as a collector’s car. There are whole websites dedicated to Cougar XR7’s.

Astonishingly enough a good-looking Cougar XR7 is only worth about $25000 to $35000 in the United States and €25000 in Europe.²

Would it have paid off for my father to keep that car? It would have been another 45 years. Not at all.

Today he could at best receive $35000 in today’s dollars. We’ll calculate in today’s dollars to avoid a tedious expedition into inflation.

Good quality garaging costs about $100/month, whether it’s part of a larger estate, whether it’s borrowed from a friend or if you just pay for the space in cash. Keeping the car running and the filters, oil and rubber pipes in working condition is at least $1500/year (some years less, yes, but some years more.

So the cost would be $2700/year of upkeep not including insurance (which on a V8 Cougar should probably be included, but let’s assume that it’s parked on an estate and doesn’t see the open road most years, as it’s a collector’s car). The years where it’s driven enough to insure, the car has real use and we won’t bill the insurance as bare maintenance.

45 years x $2700 would be $121500 in today’s dollars (of course one would pay along the way in much smaller amounts but relatively more valuable pre-inflation dollars).

I had an elegant silver Mercedes 280 CE Coupe with black interior. I picked the car up for 25000 francs in 1998 (about $5000). I took the car with me to Canada a few years later for $2000 in transportation costs. The car sold later for a song to a neighbour but needed a lot of work after not being driven for a decade. Had I returned to Canada I’d still be driving that car (probably not winters) which is why it stuck around so long.

These Benzes are worth about €23000 now in perfect condition with just 41000km. Let’s do the math again.

1998 to 2023 would be 25 years. 25 years x $2700/year would be $67500.

The numbers speak for themselves. There’s nothing wrong with a 1985 Mercedes 280 Coupé per se. I’d still like to be driving one. But there’s absolutely no economic sense in holding on to one unless you are driving it.

Collecting cars is a very bad idea economically. It almost always makes more sense to let someone else pay to maintain and store a vehicle until you are ready to drive it,³ regardless of how many decades that may be.

Photos credits: Mecum (Cougar XR7) and Graham Woodward (Mercedes-Benz 280CE).

In terms of the treatment of Uighurs in China, the only comment I would make is that violent revolutionaries and separatists in the West have been fairly harshly dealt with. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared martial law in the face of the Quebec separatist movement. Currently Catalonian elected members of European Parliament have had their immunity lifted and are subject to extradition to Spain where draconian prison sentences await them. Sedition is usually the charge we bandy about.

To leave the Uigher question for another day and more generally address the slave labour issue, dustinthewind makes a very good argument against general slave labour in China. Call it the Henry Ford argument.

The slave labor nonsense is BS as is the torture and selling of organs of the Uighars which came from on paper written by someone in Germany and has been proved false. Those in the west are simply gullible and governments using the media know that if they repeat something enough learning from Goebbels the public will believe. Weapons of mass destruction, a guy in a cave planned and coordinated 9-11, Syria gassed its own people, Russia invaded and stole Crimea, Contra drugs for weapons in Nicaragua, Chinese suppressing religion and “western values” in Hong Kong, destroying Venezuela and its population to remove another elected leader as in Ukraine, removing Trump and of course no election fraud, and its goes on and on and on. China has been building the largest consumer economy on the planet and many international firms like Volkswagen sell more units there than anywhere. Obviously you do not create the largest consumer economy and have the population buy things from all over the world if you are paying slave labor. The west likes to compare wages using exchange rates which the dollar being stronger than most other currencies gives people a false sense of reality. A good example in reverse is Japan back over 2 decades ago and the Big Mac index. Back then a Mac would cost you over $10 US dollars using our currency but obviously Mcdonalds could never survive if the Japanese were actually paying that much in yen terms in purchasing power. Using PPP how much does $100 yuan in China buy you compared to $100 dollars in the US if you bought the same exact items. The yuan would buy you everything on the list and have money left over while in the US the $100 would not even buy the whole list. So the bottom line is not only in China but other countries how far does a currency go in that specific country compared to how far does a dollar go in the US. The yuan has more buying power so using exchange rates to compare wages is misleading. The wages seem lower using this example as the west is famous for but in reality the yuan buys much more. You need more dollars in income to survive in the US hence higher wages when compared to other countries. That does not mean others are receiving slave labor. Their paychecks although lower simply buy more and hence why China now has such a large consumer economy. Last months retail sales there were a disappointment and the Central Committee met and their goal at that meeting was “How do we increase disposable income” and increase living standards” while Biden and his other communist and socialist are going to reduce disposable income, lower living standards, lower GDP, create more wealth inequality in a period of the economy headed for a depression next year which these polices are the last thing any sane human would do. Add in the cost of illegal immigrants and the next massive $4 trillion debt plan, the US is in trouble, big trouble. As Dr Hunt has said the government has taken and taken a larger piece of the pie from the people to survive and now even before the new taxes the economy can no longer generate any significant growth or job creation. Mismanagement on an indescribable scale. As he also states GDP does not subtract from the massive capital and wealth destruction from the lockdowns and these jobs and businesses simply cannot be replaced in a few years. The economic stats are misleading. GDP falling 32% and then going back up doesn’t account for the massive hollowing out from the destruction that it caused. China has now the largest economy surpassing the US measuring GDP using PPP and soon it will pass the US using nominal GDP as the polices in the west of the Great Reset will destroy western society and its economies. Again the models at Armstrong Economics also forecast China becomes the world’s financial center as capital will accelerate from west to east as the massive tax increases start in the west. The models are already tracking capital fleeing Europe to China buying mostly 3% bonds which will accelerate as we move into the future. China also last year has passed the US in foreign direct investment. Capital knows no national boundaries or ideology and will always move to where it can get yield and it believes is safe. The US and the west are losing that belief in safety and return as the dems controlled by the World Economic Forum are implementing their destruction of economies, fossil fuels, businesses, pensions, owning small businesses, etc. as the coming tax increases will wipe out the remaining middle class and create massive wealth inequality and massive job losses as we enter 2022 and the Great Depression. The US along with the west are headed for a breakup which is post 2032 and economic hardships starting next year worse than now.

I call it the Henry Ford argument as Ford revolutionised the car industry and created the largest car manufacturer in the world in 1903. By 1910, Ford was selling more Model T cars than all the other car manufacturers in the world. He did not do so by employing slave labour but by paying a living wage, allowing his own employees to buy Model T’s. In his own words:

I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.

I’m not a huge fan of cars – cars have done and continue to do enormous damage to the natural world – more of a bicycle man myself. And I keep my bicycles for ten, fifteen, twenty years. Most of the bicycles I’ve retired were due to theft. But Ford is right here about living wages. One cannot sustain an economic boom by failing to pay workers enough to participate in general prosperity. If slave labour worked, the Pharaohs would still reign over the entire Middle East and would have taken over Europe too.

This charge of slave labour looks like another propaganda stick invented with which to beat China. It’s sad that our politicians and captains of industry only hope to win in business is by making up stories to exclude competition. Not a very free enterprise approach, I must say.

think it’s quite evident who will profit from the pandemic and lockdowns. 1) Amazon and other online retailers who can support locked down inhabitants of the new dystopia 2) Google and other online info/entertainment venues who now have much larger demand through lock down 3) Gates and the Vaccine industry who have governments all over the world racing to throw money at them as fast as they can 4) The global banking cartel, who lubricates all this shit and gets fat no matter which way things turn 5) Klaus, and Club Davos, the Royals and the Global Corporatists who were betting on this change so as to make it happen. 6) Last but not least, the new green orgy of climate correctness and bureaucratic collectivism. That’s the only wild card – they are up against the old world oil and gold order. As usual, the Roths play both ends against the middle. Not really too big a mystery here …

Nothin’ is happening. Nothing. Do not let anyone tell you there is something happening. There isn’t. Nothing is happening until all monies sitting in offshore tax havens are emptied out and zero.

The damage Chesapeake has done to the North American water table will take nature millions of years to undo. All of that environmental damage was done while running in the red. Accessible energy resources were easily available from Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia but instead as a matter of policy, Americans chose to poison their land. Chesapeake Energy is a symbol of the cupidity, corruption and short-sightedness of US leadership.

The conversation at ZeroHedge was fascinating. Hardcharger82 strangely feels that he’s happy to be old, or in his words:

“I am glad I’m not young anymore.”

Something I have been saying a lot in the last few years. There is a world of shit coming to the young people and it is approaching faster everyday.

Spend your money and enjoy it while it is still worth something. Time is short.

Wacky47 sensibly countered that every generation faces its own challenges:

we had our Viet Nam, our parents had WWII, theirs had the Depression….the wheel in the sky keeps on turning….watch the end of Margin Call, sums it all up…..

Wacky is right that we should fear to face adversity or even calamity. Existence comes with no guarantees. Living is hazardous and ends only in death. Still, through all of those cycles what is constant is that the percentage of assets owned by plutocrats has only risen. The gap in salary between CEO and normal employee has jumped from 10-20x to 100x to 400x. A reset is necessary here. Not that there shouldn’t be winners but I don’t remember signing up for winner takes all.

It’s high time that Americans tackled the real problems of plutocracy and class-division. While part of the population is in the streets in what are often violent demonstrations, racism is a war that has largely been won. There are many wealthy black entertainers, successful black politicians, busines people and black athletes. On the other hand, the percentage of unionised workers has fallen from a high of about 35% in the thirties to just over 10% now.

It’s high time that American people of all race and creed take steps to throw off their financial chains and unite to create a more equitable society. Almost everyone would be happier. The misery of some of the 1% is a price well worth paying to see ninety percent of the people happier.

How did the Dumas’s Musketeers put it? Un pour tous, tous pour un: All for one and one for all. And that ladies and gentlemen, curiously, is the motto of Switzerland, the more persistently prosperous and peaceful of nations over the last few hundred years.

(Did the author just now figure out that there is no made in America? Take a look inside your assembled in the USA refrigerator. It has a piece of shit compressor that cost $5 and was made in Guatemala. Shinola tried to “manufacturer” bicycles and watches in the USA. Nearly all the parts come from Asia other than the frames. Window manufacturers get pellet stock for the frame extrusions from Taiwan. There are only two leather tanneries left in the USA. New Balance makes one sneaker in the USA. They are $180 a pair and are pieces of shit. There is no manufacturing coming back to the USA. The cost for me to make one of my products in the US, when we made it here in 2007 was $19. MY COST!!! The competition sells for $29 retail. The most a major retailer will pay is $13.50. If I manufacture my product here and try to make any money, wholesale will need to be $28. Retail will be $69.99. Would you pay $69.99 for the exact same product that you can buy for $29 just to buy American?.

Look, I’d love for manufacturing to come back, but we aren’t Germany. We decimated everything and taught a generation fake math. Where is the knowledge going to come from to run the factories, let alone the people who will assemble thousands of trinkets for $10 an hour, which will only cause 120% inflation in the price of everything you’d buy.

Chubais who is still lurking around as the head of RosnanoRosnano who have managed to squander $4 billion of Russian government investment to build a company with $25 million in annual revenue with operating losses of $80 million year.

Anatoly Borisovich still feels competent to offer his advice on Russia. On 16 January he declared:

Russia is one of the poorest and energy wasteful states. He added that a major part of the population is poor or very poor.

Mr. Chubais is certainly correct that Russia does not handle its internal energy needs very efficiently. There are an enormous number of Soviet era utility vehicles still working cleaning streets and moving snow or even buses that simply guzzle gas or diesel. Not only is their fuel consumption wasteful, they do a stunning job in increasing smog in Moscow and every single provincial town. Moreover much of the heating grid is via hot water pipes from central plants. Many old apartments have radiators which cannot be adjusted. The only way to lower the temperature in winter is to keep the window open. Insulation is an afterthought in Soviet design. There’s plenty of gas and building with insulation is expensive.

Certainly there is scope for a gradual transition to more efficient consumption of energy which would benefit Russia by creating a great surplus of oil and gas to be sold abroad. Gradual transition is the keyword here. It wouldn’t benefit Russia one iota to spend a fortune on foreign general purpose utility vehicles and buses without creating their own production lines. The same applies to insulation – the need for insulation is so great that production should be Russian-based, working with Russian raw materials. The basic principles of insulation are clear the world over, the most important patents in production long expired. There’s no need for the most efficient or lightweight or expensive insulation. There’s a need for a great deal of good insulation.

But Mr Chubais accusation that Russia is one of the poorest states in the world is simply nonsense if solvency is one of the measures. Russia runs an approximately $20 billion trade surplus. Russia’s debt is about $450 billion on a GDP which oscillates between $1284 billion and $2297 billion depending on how the ruble has been valued on currency markets. This means that Russian external debt is approximately 20% to 30% of GDP, even denominated in dollars. This compares very favourably to Japan at 220%, Italy at 137%, Belgium at 115%, USA and Spain at 106%, France at 99 or UK and Canada at 90%.

Another mitigating factor for Russia is the presence of currency reserves of $467 billion. Currency reserves include both foreign currency deposits and gold holdings. Russia’s currency reserves exceed external debt, effectively making Russia’s external debt 0% of GDP. Japan also holds huge currency reserves with GDP of $4.872 trillion (2017), national debt of $10 trillion (2017) and currency reserves of $1.253 trillion (2018) which reduces Japan’s huge ratio of debt to GDP from about 220% to about 190%.

In addition to foreign reserves, Russia also has a National Wealth Fund with $65 billion of assets. Due to lower oil prices though the Russian National Wealth Fund has shrunk from a maximum of $160 billion. Some part of these funds are includes in the forex reserves above but it’s still significantly tilts Russia’s debt to GDP further to a plus.

Certainly by the conventional measures of debt ratio and external currency reserves, Russia is not a poor country. Indeed, it is one of the richest countries on earth by these measures with the lowest net government debt of any significant economy on earth (indeed a surplus).

That’s the numbers. Here’s a more polemical comparison of the United States and Russia which I find instructive.

If those pesky Russians would just listen to the ‘chosen ones’, they too, would be like the U.S. Where 50-60 million live in entrenched poverty, 60 million living on food subsidies from the government, about 100 million out of work, disabled and/or both. 2.5 million people in prison, the highest in the world by capita ratio by leaps and bounds, 3500 sentenced to death, 90,000 wake up every morning in solitary confinement, spending 23 out of 24 hours in a cage the size of a parking space. The rate of illiteracy is staggering, and the number of people, in the tens of millions hooked on opiates, Heroin and Fentanyl. And with it a staggering number of overdose deaths and near deaths. Major cities, like Detroit, Michigan, look like bombed out post apocalypse wastelands. Tent cities everywhere you look, with downtown Los Angeles called ‘skid row’ due to the homeless epidemic they have there. And this goes for most big cities. Hopelessness and despair gripping millions, with no end in sight. An entire region of the U.S. called ‘The Rust Belt’ due to decaying infrastructure, torn up roadways and highways. 60 million ignorant, moronic Americans in ‘ The Bible Belt’ believe that the creation, and maintenance of Israel (contrary to 70 U.N. Resolutions , international conventions and norms) will usher in a divine ‘Rapture’ and that they, and only they out of the whole of humanity will be ‘saved’ and that the Jews will convert to Christianity overnight. Moral decline in the supposed top country in the world has reached beyond what one could possibly comprehend. With about half the population on anti-depressants, antipsychotic, anti anxiety medication/s due to them being confused, lied to, manipulated and led down an unnatural human experience. I could go on and on, but I would say Russia, China, Iran et al have a better civilizational model and they are trying to bring it forth. The old western model is cruel, cold, bloody, counterproductive, unjust, racist, hegemonic, belligerent to say the least.

High time that Anatoly Borisovich looked at where Russia is now in comparison to where it was when he and his partners in crime pillaged the remains of the Soviet Union. Unlike the United States, Russia is making progress in the fight against poverty, development of the economy and in building infrastructure. It’s unlikely that Anatoly Borisovich or his fellow traveller Transatlanticists are making much progress in persuading Russians to return to the days of perestroika. Frankly, Mr Chubais’s efforts on behalf of Russia would be better rewarded with a jail cell than a government office.