{"id":275122,"date":"2016-10-24T20:04:32","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T19:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nuclear-annihilation\/"},"modified":"2016-10-24T20:04:32","modified_gmt":"2016-10-24T19:04:32","slug":"nuclear-annihilation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nuclear-annihilation\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear Annihilation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Twenty-five years<\/span> is a long time to get back to where you started, but two-and-a-half decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the United States, not the Russian Federation, that has succeeded in restoring the threat of nuclear annihilation to the global conversation.\u00a0 And, by means of economic sanctions, energy-infrastructure intrusions, and financial manipulations, it is the U.S. that has returned Russia to a state of isolation from Europe.<\/p>\n

Having pulled the Ukrainian door to the motherland off its hinges by means of engineering a coup in Kiev over two years ago, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment has followed up with an expansion of NATO to the very borders of Russia.\u00a0 The thinking appears to be that where American provocations to bait Russia into invading Ukraine have failed, perhaps two new missile bases in Rumania and Poland and four new army bases in Eastern Europe and the Baltics will do the trick.<\/p>\n

None of which is to say that the globalists don\u2019t sense the danger; they do.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not the danger created by their own offensive actions they fear: It is a volatile electorate that is signaling they have had enough of Washington\u2019s useless wars and costly meddling abroad that has them shaking in their boots.\u00a0 If the New World Order crowd is to succeed in propelling their fully paid-for agent, Hillary Clinton, into the White House come November, it is vital that they keep any serious discussion of U.S. foreign policy out of the campaign chatter.<\/p>\n

The only light in the foreign-policy closet has been Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump\u2019s opening the door a crack and taking a peek.\u00a0 Trump has suggested that perhaps NATO is no longer needed, or at least not in its present form.\u00a0 (If he had only stopped his thought at the halfway mark, it would have been a flawless statement.)\u00a0 Other heresies Trump has advanced include striking a deal with Vladimir Putin for their two nations to buddy up and eliminate ISIS together, an idea the Russians have long advocated.\u00a0 Overstepping the common narrative even further, Trump wondered aloud if the crisis in Ukraine wasn\u2019t really Europe\u2019s problem to solve, and whether Russia\u2019s annexation-by-referendum of Crimea shouldn\u2019t be accepted as the will of the people of Crimea.<\/p>\n

Current Prices on popular forms of Silver Bullion<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

With the stage being set for Cold War II, Americans ought to be asking themselves just what they got out of the original.\u00a0 What exactly was their government\u2019s game all those years, so long ago now as to be forgotten?\u00a0 Were all the serial wars, violent coups, proxy wars, and orchestrated regime changes actually undertaken for the beneficial extension of \u201cAmericanism\u201d worldwide, as the state\u2019s propagandists insist?\u00a0 Not a chance.\u00a0 If spreading \u201cAmericanism\u201d hither and yon were the point of U.S. foreign policy, then the federal government\u2019s domestic and mass-immigration policies would not be designed to destroy what precious little remains of it.<\/p>\n

What the United States<\/span> actually exports is a predatory financial system centered on the paper dollar as the single international reserve currency.\u00a0 The system was put in place at the end of World War II, but the scheme\u2019s international component emerged from John Foster Dulles\u2019s adventures in the interwar years arranging highly profitable loans for his Sullivan and Cromwell clients\u2014Brown Brothers, Lazard Fr\u00e8res, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and the First National Bank of Boston\u2014to mostly German banks, a scheme exposed by Stephen Kinzer in his book The Brothers<\/em>(Henry Holt & Co.). The pickings were so good that he and his clients were soon force-feeding loans to a wider customer base that included mostly German cities and administrative regions, frequently entities that weren\u2019t actually in need of the money.\u00a0 What are known as the \u201cBretton Woods Institutions\u201d (the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) had found their ideal model\u2014i.e<\/em>., lending to a defeated but economically competent or resource-rich adversary saddled with war reparations or excess borrowing.<\/p>\n

Assorted international political parasites couldn\u2019t resist such a gusher of profits and quickly adapted Dulles\u2019s scheme to the government\u2019s and American big banks\u2019 needs by replacing Sullivan and Cromwell\u2019s private investors with American taxpayers, who, unlike Sullivan and Cromwell\u2019s clients, were in no position to object or qualify the institutions\u2019 lending.\u00a0 In the future, corporations and the big banks would contribute to an institutional lending stream of public money and thereby guarantee their loans through the back door.\u00a0 A borrower could default or delay, but taxpayers unwittingly ponied up the vig for the entire loan, which the institutions would promptly roll over into a new and larger loan.<\/p>\n

When European borrowers lost their appetite for borrowing, the institutions created a new, super-easy money facility that allowed them to venture into the developing world with disastrous results for borrowers whose leaders, as anticipated, promptly confiscated the lion\u2019s share of the sums and sent them far, far away to their private Swiss bank accounts.<\/p>\n

It was in this same era that the ideas John Maynard Keynes advocated in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money<\/em> (1936) caught fire.\u00a0 Keynes\u2019s treatise is a confused political theory masquerading as economics that provides a rationale for systemic government intervention into markets, and, most critically, for central banking, which, in turn, is the engine of government growth.<\/p>\n

Keynes\u2019s scam seized the rather dull imaginations of academic economists, who went on to draw many decades\u2019 worth of fat Fed paychecks for their service in extending, elaborating, and explaining Keynes\u2019s convoluted ideas\u2014ideas that turned the laws of classical economics upside down.\u00a0 For example, savings are not the only source of investment capital a nation can rely on since foreign capital flees at the first sign of trouble; rather, savings are a burden on the national economy.\u00a0 Investment and spending capital could more usefully come from the printing press, the product first being lent out at interest.\u00a0 What matters is consumption and spending, not saving, and consumption precedes production, which itself is stimulated by the public\u2019s perpetual desire for more<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Though communism never stood a dog\u2019s chance of establishing itself in the hyper commercial United States, Keynesian socialism, alas, proved an all too easy sell.\u00a0 The real threat of Cultural Marxism crept into American life unnoticed by means of left-wing academics, who slowly corrupted first American universities and later a federally controlled public educational system.\u00a0 The ideas governing Keynes\u2019s corporate state\u2014ideas he admitted in the Introduction to the German edition of his treatise were far more suitable to \u201cthe conditions of a totalitarian state\u201d like National Socialist Germany than to \u201cconditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire\u201d\u2014encouraged the people to consume their future today.\u00a0 Thus, the concise four-word summary of World War II: Germany lost; fascism won.<\/p>\n

The debt would never come due, the government assured the people, insisting that it was just an accounting entry, since \u201cwe owe it to ourselves.\u201d\u00a0 The real threat, Americans were told, was monolithic Soviet communism.<\/p>\n

American politicians had learned that the post-World War II system based on the U.S. dollar allowed the federal government to run massive deficits.\u00a0 Foreign countries held their reserves in dollars per the Bretton Woods agreement, and the federal government solemnly pledged to back the dollar with gold.\u00a0 To be half of 70 percent of every international transaction conveys incomprehensible economic power.<\/p>\n

Foreigners give us real goods and services, and in return, we give them paper notes with engravings of dead politicians on them at an approximate cost of three cents per note.\u00a0 In brief, we were able to import cost-free, and foreigners were able to sell into the largest, most voracious consumer market on earth.\u00a0 Everybody\u2014consumers, exporters, and importers\u2014reveled in the artificial prosperity.<\/p>\n

When what Keynes had insisted could never happen did happen in the 1970\u2019s, the era of stagflation, his theory fell out of fashion, but its tools were never set aside.\u00a0 Deficits continued their upward spiral.<\/p>\n

There are many flies in the monetary ointment, but one\u2014the Triffin Dilemma\u2014isn\u2019t mentioned very often.\u00a0 In the 1960\u2019s, Belgian economist Robert Triffin perceived the system\u2019s Achilles\u2019 heel: debt saturation.\u00a0 In 1971, the system did indeed back up, when the dollar reserves European exporters had been stashing back home were exchanged for U.S. gold, thereby lowering the value of the dollar.\u00a0 The solution Washington opted for was to jettison gold.\u00a0 In the future, foreigners\u2019 dollar profits would be recycled into the purchase of U.S. sovereign bonds.<\/p>\n

The dollar skyrocketed, but that phenomenon was and is a consequence of foreigners\u2019 need for liquidity in a market meltdown, a time when every country, including the United States, needs a weak currency.\u00a0 Rather than being a sign of economic health, a steeply rising dollar can instead be a sign of debt saturation.<\/p>\n

Owing to the economic and military might of the United States, the reserve-currency status of the dollar actually grew in acceptance.\u00a0 By the late 1980\u2019s, under the Reagan administration, the United States went from a creditor to a debtor nation; but given the country\u2019s status as the planet\u2019s largest market, it might be more helpful to say that the U.S. became the only vendor-financed country on earth.<\/p>\n

In 2007, when it happened again\u2014despite the floating-rate regime established in 1971\u2014the solution was to bail out the profligate money-center banks with upward of $700 billion of taxpayers\u2019 money and then drive yields on U.S. Treasuries to near zero.\u00a0 Having accomplished not much besides doubling the U.S. national debt to some $20 trillion, central bankers have begun instituting negative rates, meaning depositors must pay the banks to hold their deposits, a situation that has never obtained in 5,000 years of recorded history.\u00a0 As the world approaches debt saturation yet again, Fed bureaucrats, academics, and media mouthpieces are shilling the suffocating solution of dispensing with cash entirely.\u00a0 All transactions will be processed through the banks, each transaction recorded for every government\u2019s taxman.<\/p>\n

Our wondrous new technologies will mean not only our finances and daily purchases will be tracked, but so, too, in real time will our physical movements, all our written and spoken thoughts and all our interactions with one another be recorded.\u00a0 Our files will be handed over to the behavioral economists at DARPA, who will then devise individual algorithms that will both police and guide each of us.<\/p>\n

In other words, the price for nearly seven decades of Keynesian-approved central-bank swindling will be a universal tyranny such as the world has never seen.\u00a0 And there will be no escape but that of the grave.<\/p>\n

But even universal tyranny isn\u2019t the full price that might be paid.\u00a0 To what purpose did the federal government put the national largesse?\u00a0 Well, first the government instituted socialism in exchange for votes because it could.\u00a0 Socialism has corrupted Americans just as readily as it has populations wherever it\u2019s been tried.\u00a0 Easy pickin\u2019s married to our high consumption levels have left us obese, dull-witted, and our jobless children seeking \u201csafe spaces\u201d over the challenges of life and debate.<\/p>\n

The other endeavor for which our corporate state put its shoulder to the wheel was the building of a permanent war machine economy, which relies upon an extravagant global system of foreign military bases, paper money, a network of domestic arms manufacturers that ensures at least one producer and his well-paid employees are situated in every congressman\u2019s district, and the requisite consumption of some hapless but resource-rich country every several years or so.<\/p>\n

The national bonus, our lame-duck President informs us, is that we need to spend a trillion dollars upgrading our nuclear defenses, for which our military doctrine now claims first-strike use.\u00a0 Universal tyranny may well be the least of our troubles.<\/p>\n

There is only one country on earth that has declined to step into the Triffin Dilemma.\u00a0 Yes, that\u2019s right: Russia, whose debt is negligible and who has managed the ruble well through the storm of troubles the U.S. and a shamelessly pliable Europe have sent her way over the last several years, while determinedly resisting the siren calls of the money pumpers and building financial institutions and structures independent of those of the West.\u00a0 Russian prudence and increasing gold reserves will prove to be one of the nation\u2019s greatest assets in the Great Default to come, but, like death, no man knows when or where it might come.<\/p>\n

At the Cold War\u2019s end,<\/span> for the third time in the 20th century, the United States squandered the peace, bit by precious bit, like a carefree boy skipping stones on a lake.\u00a0 U.S. designs on Russia were afoot well before the Soviets\u2019 hammer and sickle was lowered for the last time on December 25, 1991.\u00a0 It was then that the American \u201clong train of abuses and usurpations\u201d in active pursuit of control over the Eurasian land mass and the earth\u2019s many treasures contained therein enabled what much of the world today sees as not the exceptional (nor indispensable) but the insufferable nation\u2019s dubious triumph.\u00a0 Indeed, we are the Eddie Haskell of nations, sometimes referred to abroad as the \u201cUnited Snakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first post-Cold War task the United States pursued was to get her financial artillery inside Russia.\u00a0 George H.W. Bush tapped former New York Fed governor Gerald Corrigan to institute the nonadvertised Bank Forum project, funded through an unannounced U.S. Treasury grant in January 1992.\u00a0 Thus did Yeltsin\u2019s minions begin learning the delicate art of funding the government out of thin air, which in this case required the assistance of billions in IMF loans.<\/p>\n

Wall Street, whose bread and butter are bond markets, had been salivating for a Russian sovereign debt market ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall.\u00a0 Corrigan built it, and they came.\u00a0 Corrigan\u2019s product, Russian bonds (GKOs), were the key component in Russia\u2019s second collapse in 1998 and supplied a large pot of money for use in the evolution of the Clintons\u2019 corruption.<\/p>\n

George Soros came, too, and his grants to young wannabe traders for study abroad to learn the ins and outs of a modern screen trading suitable for high-powered speculation utterly killed the nascent market that had sprung up spontaneously in Khitai Gorod (\u201cChina City\u201d) across the street from the ancient and colorful Chinese tea market.\u00a0 Those early players, who were developing the bonds of trust and faith healthy markets require, were swamped by the Western system\u2019s high-tech bells and whistles, and soon driven into obscurity.<\/p>\n

U.S. aid and advice to Yeltsin\u2019s Russia served to create a financially induced genocide as the only growth reported was a rise in death certificates.\u00a0 Funerals became truly communal; the corpses of three grannies shared the costs of their final church service, which no one babushka\u2019s savings could pay.\u00a0 After Jeffrey Sachs convinced Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar to free prices in January 1992 in what was still a monopolistic economy, the subsequent inflationary inferno, which reached an annual temperature of 2,500 percent, consumed the Russian people\u2019s considerable savings.\u00a0 Succinctly and correctly summing up the Harvard crowd\u2019s privatization program as executed by Anatoly Chubais, Vladimir Zhirinovsky raged to me from our side-by-side perch in the Duma\u2019s visitors\u2019 gallery, \u201cThey have relieved the population of all their money, and now they put the whole country up for sale!\u201d<\/p>\n

Workers went unpaid for months and, in some cases, years, lost their pensions and healthcare, transport and other infrastructure broke down, the national estate fell to rubble, and whatever was viable was stripped and carried away by scoundrels of all nationalities, most especially theirs and ours.<\/p>\n

Yet the West\u2019s key purchase, Boris Yeltsin, reigned unimpeded by cannon, assassin\u2019s bullet, or popular protests.\u00a0 Bill Clinton, having seen to a $500 million loan to get \u201cOl\u2019 Boris\u201d re-elected in 1996, couldn\u2019t risk losing his semiconscious, easily cajoled, and unwitting partner in NATO enlargement.\u00a0 The Russian people were well and truly left on their own, with no one to champion them.\u00a0 One dispirited Duma deputy remarked with a heavy sigh, \u201cIt just seems like nothing we try works.\u201d<\/p>\n

A lot has changed in Russia over the years since those hard days.\u00a0 The turning point was unexpected and surprising.\u00a0 It came with the collapse of the Russian bond market in August 1998, which prompted the exit of much of the expat community and U.S. advisors, and marked the last days of Boris Yeltsin.\u00a0 Coincidentally, the rise in the price of oil began then, the treasury started showing positive balances, and in the nick of time a champion arrived, a self-described \u201cperfect product of a Soviet patriotic education,\u201d Vladimir Putin\u2014Boris Yeltsin\u2019s first and last gift to the Russian people.<\/p>\n

In small stories, we can learn a lot about someone.\u00a0 After his first G8 meeting, Putin, an accomplished speaker of German, realized his inability to speak English put him and his country at a disadvantage.\u00a0 He couldn\u2019t engage in the other attendees\u2019 repartee, appreciate a casual witticism, or respond naturally to a friendly comment.\u00a0 Upon returning home, the then-50-year-old Russian president began to study English with a tutor for an hour per day.\u00a0 I have never witnessed another public political figure recognize and correct his own deficiencies in order to do his job properly.\u00a0 Undertaking the acquisition of a new language at age 50 reflects the rare determination and a lifetime habit of discipline and self-improvement.<\/p>\n

All of which brings me back to what we might expect, should Donald Trump manage against all odds to take the oath of office next January and have the meeting with Vladimir Putin he says he wants.\u00a0 I predict such a meeting would go well, bringing both Russians and Americans positive results, because of one important characteristic the two men share.<\/p>\n

Both men are builders.\u00a0 No, Putin is not a billionaire real- estate developer, but he knows full well his mission is to modernize Russia by rebuilding her.\u00a0 And that\u2019s exactly what he\u2019s doing.\u00a0 You might think of him as a man who is building a market economy in one country\u2014a country with long-standing communal traditions that are in no way a consequence of communist ideology.<\/p>\n

And Donald Trump?\u00a0 Well, he\u2019s a \u201cflamboyant\u201d guy from Queens who resculpted Manhattan\u2019s cityscape and now wants to \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Trump is successful in his quest for the U.S. presidency, I hope someone will whisper in his ear a piece of advice from that most remarkable of German chancellors, Otto von Bismarck: \u201cThe secret of politics?\u00a0 Make a good treaty with Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

After all, and to borrow a thought from the Donald, what have we got to lose?<\/p>\n

Reprinted with the author\u2019s permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Best of Anne Williamson<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twenty-five years is a long time to get back to where you started, but two-and-a-half decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the United States, not the Russian Federation, that has succeeded in restoring the threat of nuclear annihilation to the global conversation.\u00a0 And, by means of economic sanctions, energy-infrastructure intrusions, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-275122","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}