By Bill Lindo
Belize City, April 28th 2022: In my last blog (March 11th 2022) I wrote that the “Russian special military operations” against NATO in Ukraine have resulted in the end of the European domination of the planet and that it may lead to World War III, or it will result in a new just world order with a 1,000 years of peace.
Some seven weeks later, let’s look at the situation from the military, economy/financial, and agricultural view-points.
This is a proxy war between NATO and the Russian Federation. Over the weekend of April 24th 2022, US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin made this clear and on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov noted the same, and warned NATO that they are playing with the biggest nuclear power on Earth. (Russia has more nuclear weapons than any other country and the Russian nuclear weapons are much superior and advanced than any other country in the world).
Military
When the shooting started Feb 24th 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine from the North, South and East, effectively splitting the Ukraine military into three forces. The most seasoned battle-hardened Ukraine forces were already in the East (Donbass region) trying to destroy their fellow countrymen who had refused to go along with the violent over-throwing of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014. After the Nazi allied government in Kiev made speaking Russian illegal, the 30% of Ukraine‘s Russian speakers in Donbass region rebelled and formed the Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk and have fought for their “autonomy” for the last eight years from Ukraine.
From a military standpoint, Russia has shaped the battlefield. The real battle was always a land-bridge from Crimea in the South to the Donbass region in the East. The attack in the North was fake – to set the battlefield, to trick the Ukraine forces – deception they call it, and no one is better at this than Russia.
As former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson wrote on his April 19th 2022 blog: “In light of the events that have transpired in Ukraine since that “intel” was leaked to the western media about alleged chaos in Putin’s inner circle, it may be time to consider that Russia has pulled off a minor variation of Operation Quicksilver. As Russian forces withdrew from Kiev the Ukrainian commanders, in tandem with their NATO advisors, did not launch an offensive against the “retreating” Russians nor did they start moving large numbers of their soldiers to the east to bolster the defenses of the Ukrainian army dug in throughout the western edge of the Donbass. Why? This will be grist for future theses of War College students on the effectiveness of deception in war.” And as Scott Ritter Jr., a formerUnited States Marine Corps intelligence officersaid: ”In Russia the term is “Maskirovka” and the Russians are past masters of the art – just ask the German Army of 1944: Operation Bagration, the Lvov–Sandomierz Operation, the Invasion of Romania. The first cleared Belorussia of the German Army Group Centre and the other two kicked the Germans right out of the Ukraine, and Romania out of the war to become a Russian Ally. The Germans knew that an operation was coming but where? The Russians convinced the Germans that the attack would be in the Ukraine which they prepared for. They then hit them (with up to 2 million men, 5,000 (approx) tanks and Assault Guns, and about 600 aircraft). When the Germans were forced to bring their mobile reserves in from the Ukraine to fill the gaps created. Wham the Russians hit them in the Ukraine! Both these operations saw the Germans thrown back on the Vistula River in Poland. In the process the Germans lost an entire Army (9th Army), another (3rd) severely mauled. In total one Army HQ, eleven Corps HQs were captured (11 Generals KIA, 22 Captured), 30 Divisions destroyed (annihilated) and a further 20 severely mauled. In addition to the three mentioned the Russians also conducted a further two major operations. One to clear the Baltics of the Germans and the second to knock the Finns out of the war. Both successful! Don’t forget that Russia contributed some 80% to the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War; and paid the ultimate price with the death of over 27 million Russians.
The United States and its western allies are sending a large amount of material equipment and weapon systems to Ukraine and, shortly after they arrive and are being assembled, are blown up with missiles. NATO systems have proven worthless to stopping hypersonic missile strikes. Russia is sending a clear message with bombs and missiles – the Russians blew up key railroad junctions west of Kiev, effectively cutting the ability of moving any tanks or heavy equipment to the East. On April 27th 2022, CNN was saying that Russia was making steady progress in the Donbass Region as it destroyed the Ukraine military in the East and South – on its way to the de-militarization of Ukraine. And on April 27th 2022, Russian President Putin warned the West: “If someone decides to intervene in the ongoing events from the outside and create unacceptable strategic threats to us, they should know that our response to those oncoming blows will be swift, “lightning-fast”… We have all the tools to do this. Tools that no one except us can brag about. But we are not going to brag. We’ll use them if such a need arises”. Russia is the only country in the world with the hypersonic missiles which it has been using in Ukraine with deadly results; and last week it successfully tested a new state-of-the-art RS-28 Sarmat ICBM able to carry Avangard hypersonic gliders able to hit any target anywhere in this world. For now at least, the US and NATO allies have no such weapons in their arsenal.
Over the weekend of April 23rd 2022, US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin clearly stated that the aim of the proxy war by the USA and its NATO allies was to weaken – to destroy Russia, and that NATO will continue to supply Ukraine with weapons so that this can be accomplished. The world order created after the Second World War and the Cold War isn’t working anymore, so the West needs “a Global NATO” to pursue geopolitics again, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss stated, in a major foreign policy speech on Wednesday, April 27th 2022 in London. Truss also insisted the US-led bloc to send more “heavy weapons, tanks and airplanes” to Ukraine, and said China would face the same treatment as Russia if it doesn’t “play by the rules.” “The war in Ukraine is our war – Geopolitics is back,” she announced.
However, the real situation on the ground is that Ukraine has already lost the South and most of the East in the Donbass region. Russia is now advancing towards Odessa the last remaining port under the control of Ukraine, which they will soon loose. Ukraine will become a land-lock country if they continue to let themselves be used by the West. And now Poland is starting to think that it can recover territory from Ukraine it lost after World War II.
British FM Liz Truss says a ‘Global NATO’ needs to arm Taiwan, like Ukraine
Economy/Financial
As soon as Moscow sent troops into Ukraine, NATO and the US unleash the biggest amount of sanctions in the history of the world. Within eight days, Russia was cut off completely from the global financial system, as well as the airspace over Canada, United States of America, Japan, South Korea, and all of Europe, and all Russian artists, writers, famous opera stars, and athletics were also banned from travelling and partaking in events. In addition, members of parliament were also banned from travelling to North America and Europe. The US President, Joe Bidden is now asking the US Congress for permission to seize Russian assets. Putin on the other hand, has continued to state that Russia respects private property and will not seize any American or European assets. The division of the planet has now become much worse than during the cold war of 1949-1990.
Behind all this craziness is the collapsing global financial system. On Sept 17th 2019 the global financial system has started to collapse. The West decided to bailout the financial system by starting a pandemic called COVID-19. All 193 countries of the UN went along with the scam of the West. For clarity, the West is United States of America, Canada, Europe (except Russia), New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. Except for Japan and South Korea, the majority race in the West are Caucasians. The population of the West is 1.35 billion persons, while the rest of the world is 6.5 billion persons, but the main three countries of Eurasia – Russia, China and India have some 3.0 billion persons. In terms of GDP the West has some $ 48 trillion or 56% of global GDP, while the rest of the world has $ 85.4 trillion. The big three non-western, Russia, China and India has some 20.4 trillion or 24% of global GDP. In terms of land area, the West has some 21%, while Russia, China and India combine occupy about 46%. And in terms of military power, the global rankings are as follows: #1 USA, # 2 Russia, # 3 China, and # 4 India. In terms of troops, India is the largest with 5.2 million troops; China has 3.1 million troops; USA has 1.8 million troops and Russia with some 1.3 million troops. In terms of nuclear weapons, Russia is # 1, USA is # 2, China is # 3 and India is # 4. All the others are far behind the big four.
For the last 200+ years, Europeans have been dominant on the planet, and since the last 30+ years, the United States has been the major dominant force on Earth. It has been called a “unipolar world”. This unipolar world has been dominated by mostly a few extremely wealthy families, led by the Rockefellers, Du Ponts, Rothschild’s, Morgan, etc. The main source of control by these oligarchs are financial control of the global central banks. Plus the majority control of petroleum and other raw materials that the 193 countries of the world depend on for human life.
On April 13th 2022, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen gave a speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC in preparation of the April 19th annual spring meeting of the IMF, World Bank, etc. In the speech, “On the Way Forward for the Global Economy,” Yellen chillingly sketched the new “globalist order” she believes must emerge from the NATO’s provoked war with Russia in Ukraine. But the hate campaign the US and the British believe they have so exceptionally executed against Putin with the aim of achieving regime change in Russia, has only resulted in soaring approval ratings for Vladimir Putin in Russia. In addition, the vast majority of the world’s population — living in India, China, Russia, Hungary, Eurasia, the Middle East, most of Latin America and Africa — has refused to go along with the proposed economic destruction of the Russian nation-state. Most of these same nations have refused to cooperate with the central bankers’ Green New Deal and Great Reset, while paying lip service to de-carbonization goals of the Western Oligarchy. At the 2021 Conference of the Parties 26 (COP 26) Glasgow conference, Russia, China, and India refused to commit the economic suicide demanded. They have not backtracked since.
More and more people now recognize that the current NATO elitist track is resulting in the human sacrifice of thousands of Ukrainians, continuing commodity and asset price inflation throughout the world, and food shortages and famines. Carried to their logical conclusion, the West’s policies will collapse the US dollar, setting off a world-wide depression. They have also brought nuclear conflict among the human race into the realm of being a very real possibility.
Janet Yellen as Vice-Chair of the US Federal Reserve during the first years of the Obama Administration, was known as Ben Bernanke’s enforcer as he created the “quantitative easing” “wall of money” which bailed out the world’s megabanks on the backs of American workers and impoverished developing nations. During the bailout, BlackRock’s Larry Fink was contracted by Yellen’s Fed to run large parts of the program — resulting in major growth for Fink’s asset management firm, becoming the largest in the world with some USD $ 12 trillion in assets. Yellen continued these policies as Fed Chair under Obama, creating what has now become the largest financial bubble in human history.
It is the looming crash of that bubble which is determining the globalist oligarchy’s actions now, especially the NATO/Ukraine conflict. In the wake of COVID 19, they are moving to control the world’s raw materials, land, and physical commodities, while continuing to “downsize” nation-states and populations in order to ensure the oligarchy’s survival and continuing power. Russia, with its vast mineral and other raw material reserves, is a huge prize in their calculus. They hope to loot it yet again, just like they did in the 1990s. The name for this policy is the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) “Great Reset,” in which Janet and the world’s central bankers star, while installed politicians are relegated to reading scripts.
Christopher Leonard’s book, The Lords of Easy Money, documents that the Fed knew, from 2008-2009 forward, that it was looting the real economy to bail out the Wall Street/London/Brussels speculative finance axis, and that its policies would create the massive wealth disparities, disinvestment in and disintegration of the real economy, widespread poverty, and deaths of despair and pessimism, which the West has experienced ever since.
In August 15th1971, US President Richard Nixon, removed the gold backing of the US dollar. The US dollar became a fiat currency giving the US Fed unlimited power to “print”– create US dollars at will. This have now resulted in the largest financial bubble in human history, which is now collapsing leading to war as the elites try to hang-on to power. When NATO pushed Russia into war it was envision that the sanctions, especially the financial sanctions would lead to the economic destruction of Russia, resulting in the overthrow of President Putin.
Instead, the financial sanctions blew-up in the face of the West. Russia has become the first major nation-state to make gold the bulwark of its currency. Rubles, the currency of Russia is now exchangeable at the rate of Ru $ 5,000 per gram of gold. And Russia will only trade with “unfriendly” countries in physical gold or Rubles. As of April 27th 2022, Bloomberg is reporting that over ten European countries are paying Russia in Rubles for oil and gas. Other friendly countries like India and China are trading in their national currencies – Rupees and Yuan. By the US weaponzing the US dollar, other nations are now afraid that the Americans and Europeans will steal from them by freezing their assets. It seems the end of the hegemony of the dollar is now coming about.
And suddenly in a bolt from Heaven, with an American System view of political economy, billionaire and engineering entrepreneur Elon Musk has once again issued a warning about the risk posed by low birth rates, rejecting the assessments of global “experts” who continue to insist that there are too many people occupying the planet. Musk, who has grabbed headlines in recent weeks for buying Twitter in a bid to restore free speech principles to the highly-censored social media platform, said last week that despite assessments from experts and climate activists, it’s low birth rates, not overpopulation, that pose a risk to the future of human civilization. Over the last couple of months, while Bill Gates has been calling for population reduction (genocide) Elon Musk has been calling for population increases. Note that while Russia, Japan, China and several European countries have declining birth rates causing them not to be able to reproduce their populations, only China and Russia have been doing anything to cure the problem. While they are giving incentives for women to have more than one child, they have been using robots to replace human labour.
Regarding the internal economic situation in Russia, Yury Borisov, Russian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Defense procurement, and the impact of Western sanctions on April 19th 2022 gave a detailed interview with RT. “We don’t see any serious threats that could undermine our work on the planned tasks in state Defense procurement. Perhaps this is a result of our Western partners keeping us on our toes since 2014. We have had plenty of time to adapt to the continuous sanctions they have been introducing against Russia…One example that has made the headlines is the Irkut MC-21 airliner. We started off by switching to the locally produced composite materials, and that’s done now. More recently, pressured by the new round of sanctions introduced in response to the operation in Ukraine, we have almost completely phased out all imports of parts such as Pratt & Whitney engines for our flagship projects. We’re really stepping up our transition efforts. The PD-14 turbofan engine is already used in the Russian MC-21 airliner. Today, when foreign engine producers have cut off their supplies, this option is no longer on the table for us. You see, in the past there used to be two options – our jets either used foreign-made engines or PD-14s. We will have to move on to ramping up mass production of MC-21, which is a fully Russian-made airliner, made up of exclusively domestic components.” The MC-21 is equivalent to the Boeing 737 or Airbus 320, but is more fuel efficient.
Agriculture
Before the West placed sanctions on Russia in 2014, Russia was a major importer of grains from especially the USA. But by 2018, Russia became the largest exporter of grains in the world and with Ukraine they sold over 30% of wheat, barley and corn global imports. Ukraine has ceased exports of wheat, oats, millet, buckwheat and cattle, and Russia has banned exports of fertilizer. Together, Russia and Belarus provide nearly 40% of the global exports of potash, a key fertilizer ingredient. Russia also exports 48% of the global ammonium nitrate, and combined with Ukraine, they export 28% of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium fertilizers. Experts are now predicting fertilizer prices may double as a result of Russia’s ban on fertilizer exports.
All shipping to the Black Sea ports of Ukraine are shut down and will probably never reopen in the near future. The only Black Sea ports open today, are Russian and they are only shipping to the 50+ countries Russia consider as “friendly”. Before the Ukraine mess, agriculture was facing problems related to the unusual increase in printing of money, labour shortages, droughts, and global shortages of micro-chips used today in most agricultural machines. Chip shortages is now twice as bad, because Western sanctions have stopped imports of neon and other materials from Russia, while the war has closed factories in Ukraine which used to supply 85% of USA neon imports. And there is a huge shortage of “flat-rack” and shipping containers, making the supply-problems more acute. In fact, for the last several months, no trader in Central America has been able to get heavy machinery from Asia due to the “flat-rack” problem.
And to make matters worse, Union Pacific rail lines have stopped transportation of fertilizers in USA due to logistics problems caused by labour shortages and equipment. Indonesia this week stated that only raw palm oil will be exported and refined palm oil will be banned from export so that domestic prices can remain low. Note that it is always the export price of a commodity that determines both domestic and export prices. In addition, sunflower oil will no longer be exported from Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine. Reuters has also been reporting that African countries have been hit disproportionally by high prices from collapsing oil seed markets. Prices have doubled in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana for cooking oils over the last couple of weeks.
Belize?
In this global scene, Belize must carefully decide its future. Belize with a population of only 430,000 is just a speck of dust in the eyes of the world, but for those of us who live here, it’s all we got. Make no mistake, larger countries such as the United States will always dominate our decisions here in Belize. But as humans made in the image of our Creator, we must strive for as much Independence we can get…we must not be slaves. The Americans have given the world a great political economic system – the American System. Belize should strive to implement this system of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Abe Lincoln, Henry C. Carey, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. George Price knew it well.
So, how can Belize survive in this current situation? Trying to deflect the blame for the breakdown of the present world’s financial economic system by pointing fingers at Putin and Russia will not solve anything. Belize has a serious problem. We have a small open economy heavily dependent on imports, raw agriculture and the leisure sector. We pay for the massive amounts of imports by revenue from foreigners using our hotels and restaurants and shipping bananas, and raw sugar to mainly the trans-Atlantic world; and some engage in the illegal trade of drugs.
Over the last 30+ years exports from Belize have never been valued at more than $450 million dollars per year, while imports have steadily climbed from some $ 650 million to over $ 2 billion today. Around the year 1995, the World Bank was trying to push the government to stop support of local manufacturing. In reaction, Prime Minister Manuel Esquivel stated that his government will continue to support local manufacturing because Belize’s future and the happiness of its citizen will be determined by how we solve the trade problem. Well, 27 year later we have not solved it and now its teething to crush us. This writer can prove that everytime the trade deficit gets worse, poverty also increases.
The only solution to the problems of today is in the physical economy. We either learn to produce or we will suffer. It’s that simple. We have the tools – a National Bank and DFC to finance the production. Commercial banks and credit unions were never set-up to finance production. And we have a political party in power whose “political creed” is supportive of such dirigiste measures.
Let’s see how it plays out!
Bill Lindo blog 