SOMETHING’S HAPPENIN'
Something’s happenin’ over there
What it is, is becoming very clear
Most of humanity’s walkin’ away
Tellin’ the West
We’re not your slaves, no more, no way!
It’s time we stop, look and listen to the sound
Of seven billion people goin’ round
Washington's bluster, bullying and bombs —
All those killing sanctions
Meant to keep them down.
Thousands are crowding Faso’s streets
Chanting “FREEDOM!” and carryin’ signs
Singin’ hooray for Putin’s side!
Globalists don’t belong here,
Our future’s ours to decide!
[with apologies to Buffalo Springfield]
Pissed off people May 18, 2023
THE GLOBAL MAJORITY FINDS THEIR MOJO
by William Thomas
Funny thing happened on Washington’s way to world domination. Those nasty neocons set a bear trap. And caught themselves.
“America’s economic sanctions and military confrontation,” observes Michael Hudson, “are driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit.” No one wants weaponized dollars. And Western pratfalls and hollow bluster elicit derisive laughter among the 85% of the world’s population outside our censored “news”.
While many are looking the other way, a new world economic order is upending the centuries-old white colonialist domination model. The West’s frenzied boomerang-sanctions, racist interventions, blatant asset seizures, and 10-year war against Russians in Ukraine have left “a huge imprint” on future Two-Thirds World dealings with the shrinking Western minority, cautions Dmitri Trenin at the Russian International Affairs Council.
“After the end of this war, ‘money’ will never be the same,” predicts Credit Suisse strategist, Zoltan Pozsar, formerly with the NY Fed, IMF and Treasury Department.
Neither will the West.
Voters in referendum on accession of Luhansk People's Republic to Russia-S Evgeny Biyatov/Sputnik
CHOOSING SIDES
“The world is not only not with us, but it is demonstratively not with us,” Viktor Orbán reminded Western warmongers last July. Pointing to the pending US/NATO defeat in Ukraine, the Hungarian President warned that “the conflict could easily put an end to Western supremacy” and “create a multipolar world order.”
We’re already there.
“The unconditional dominance of the US and its allies is a thing of the past. On February 24, 2022, the start of the special military operation in Ukraine marked the end of the unipolar world,” declared Russia’s defence minister in his welcoming address to the 10th Moscow Conference on International Security, Aug. 17, 2022.
“The Ukraine war has ultimately only accelerated the isolation and irrelevance of Europe,” chimed in political analyst, Timur Fomenko, after Russia’s widely hailed president publicly observed how “EU losses due to sanctions against Russia” could exceed $400 billion per year.
“Western industry has all but disappeared,” Kuwaiti economic consultant, Marwan Salamah picks up the thread. “Energy-starved German industry is moving East,” where nearly “virgin” markets “have ample room for additional growth.”
WHY THE WAR IN UKRAINE MATTERS
“The Ukraine war highlights the decline of the United States itself.” writes the Brookings Institute’s Fiona Hill. “Perceptions of American hubris and hypocrisy are widespread. ‘America fatigue’ and disillusionment with its role as the global hedgemon is widespread. This includes in the United States itself.
“The Rest feel constantly marginalized in world affairs,” Hill writes, when she really means, “The Most.” This exceptional American exceptionalist accurately describes the Global South's resistance to the US as “a mutiny against what they see as the collective West dominating the international discourse and foisting its problems on everyone else, while brushing aside their priorities on climate change compensation, economic development, and debt relief.
“The so-called ‘Rest’ [Most] of the world seek to cut the U.S. down to a different size in their neighborhoods and exert more influence in global affairs. They want to decide, not be told what's in their interest,” she continues. “In short, in 2023, we hear a resounding no to U.S. domination and see a marked appetite for a world without a hegemon.”
BACKFIRE
In addition to eliminating European competition by providing cover to blow up the Nordstream pipeline, “one of the key targets of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine is to interrupt BRI corridors across Russia,” Pepe Escobar explains. No wonder agression-averse Beijing is eager to broker a peace deal and get things moving.
Unfortunately for the nearsighted neocons attempts to sabotage China’s decade-old Belt and Road Initiative and keep impoverished Asia down, “NATO’s war against Russia has sped up the cooperation between Moscow, Tehran, and New Delhi, India and Iran,” comments Conor Gallagher.
Oops.
THE NEW NOAH’S ARK
Russia “is the Noah’s Ark of the world economy,” Escobar reminds the ignorant haters. “Russia is the world’s largest single source of energy, commodities, and raw materials,” adds Zerohedge, which means those darn Rooskies “can control the prices the West pays for them.” As its abortive “oil price caps” quickly proved.
THE RUSSIA-CHINA ROADBLOCK
Worldwide revulsion at American mendacity and perpetual wars could prove fatal for a make-believe US economy “dependent on foreign tribute for its survival,” observes Michael Hudson. Hence Washington’s 30-year-old project to confiscate Russia.
That’s not working. So…
“Let’s blow up Taiwan and sanction the rest of China, where all our stuff comes from!” cry the Beltway geniuses. “Having deposited much of our weaponry into the Russian trash compactor in Ukraine, our woke military social club is prepared to wage a full-on conventional war against China for seven days before our ammo runs out!”
Hold on, suggests MK Bhadrakumar, “China exceeds the combined manufacturing capacity of the US and its European allies.”
Paris under siege May 2023
PUTIN CALLS OUT THE WEST
“The situation in the world is changing dynamically and the outlines of a multipolar world order are taking shape,” Vladimir Putin addressed a head-nodding International Security Conference last August. “An increasing number of countries and peoples are choosing a path of free and sovereign development based on their own distinct identity, traditions and values.
“These objective processes are being opposed by the Western globalist elites, who provoke chaos, fanning long-standing and new conflicts and,” added the Russian president, “the subversion of any alternative, sovereign development option. They are attempting to retain countries and peoples in the grip of what is essentially a neocolonial order — neoliberal totalitarianism.”
Tell it, Vlad!
“The illusion of exceptionalism is racist and neocolonial in its essence, while the globalist, allegedly liberal ideology underlying it, is more and more acquiring the features of totalitarianism,” Putin postulated. “The United States and its vassals grossly interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states by staging provocations, organizing coups, or inciting civil wars. By threats, blackmail, and pressure, they are trying to force independent states to submit to their will and follow rules that are alien to them.
“This is being done with just one aim in view, which is to preserve their domination, the centuries-old model that enables them to sponge on everything in the world. But a model of this sort can only be retained by force.”
In fact, asserted Russia’s farsighted leader, “The historic geopolitical changes are going in a totally different direction."
TIME’s 2007 Person of the Year, Vladimir Putin, has been talking like this since his famously prophetic address at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. Chosen by popular acclaim, today the leader of a worldwide rebellion continues to back up every promise and assertion with armed resistance, foreign assistance and peace deals. Such moves resonate throughout the Two-Thirds World, which refuses to sanction what they understand to be Russia’s legitimate self-defense in the face of a truly existential threat.
Having achieved unstoppable momentum, Salamah sees “truly revolutionary” and “enormous” changes punched into hyperdrive by the neocon’s ill-conceived 2014 coup in Maidan leading to a new, “harmonious, fairer and more community-focused and safe world order.”
Seen as a longtime friend of the Global South and now as a heroic nation single-handedly taking on NATO and the psychopathic West, this ancient land of Cossacks and Tsars has become both inspiration and protector for everyone yearning to be free of American boots on their ground.
Street scene in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia -Eduardo Soteras/AFP
SEE YOU LATER
So many roundtables in so many far off places ignored by so many for so long are quietly fashioning a “Fair World Order” based on mutual sovereignty, cooperation and respect. Turbocharged by endless sanctions and the vicious Western gambit in a sacrifical Ukraine, this drastic reshuffling of centuries-old power arrangements is about to stun everyone left behind on empty platforms. Goods-packed Eurasian freight trains are already detouring around their shunned antagonists. All those “sanctioned” ships have sailed.
Unroll your Emerging World map. Tracing your finger through the far-flung ports of Mumbai and Chabahar, this “crucial connectivity” to emerging Central Asian markets will revolve around India and Iran, explains Kumar Rajan from the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…
Five tectonic global shifts ignored by US-centric media:
1. “The International North-South Transportation Corridor is a 7,200-km-long multimodal network of ship, rail, and road routes interlinking India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, Azerbaijan and Russia all the way to Finland in the Baltic Sea,” Escobar writes.
2. Another north-south overland route from Saint Petersburg through Azerbaijan and the Caspian and Arabian Seas into teeming India and Asia will skip the Suez Canal.
3. Arctic temperatures rising nearly as fast as Russia’s nuclear icebreaker fleet are turning the Northern Sea route into an increasingly important shipping shortcut across the roof of the world, further bypassing that lengthy Red Sea detour.
4. Beijing’s 10-year-old Belt and Road Initiative is about to connect six overland “Silk Road” corridors across Eurasia with the Maritime Silk Road traversing the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, “all the way to Europe,” Escobar exults.
5. Responding to Washington’s suicidal trade restrictions, the $5 billion, 600-kilometer Pakistan-Afghanistan-Kyrgyztan-Uzbekistan railway will deliver cargo from Central Asia to Indian Ocean seaports in three days instead of 30, adding another “link to the 4,380 km-long Chinese-built railway from Lanzhou to Tashkent, a BRI project,” reported Uzbekistan President Shavkat Mirziyoyev ahead of the 2022 SCO summit in the ancient crossroads of Samarkand. This revived continental connectivity will allow rail cars coming out of China to reach Iranian and Caspian ports directly, “bypassing Russian sanctions.”
Go Branden!
Continued: Toward A Peaceful Planet