Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts

Finally, SOUTH AFRICA comes out of the closet as a BRICS nation in direction, not just in name.



GEOPOLITICS

Preface: It is vital to note that BRICS has emerged principally as a consequence of geopolitical maneuvering.
It is the emergence of great power's in the east that has altered the balance of power. That means ending the post WW2 hegemonic dominance of the Anglo American Western Empire (The US and its Capital Finance Petrodollar establishment of former colonial powers turned Western vassals).
To put it another way, United States and its reserve currency (USD) unipolar world is today already widely recognised as a multipolar world.  While it has been former cold war rival of the US, the then Soviet Union, todays Russian Federation, that has made the boldest and most sensational geostrategic and military advances, most notably the strategic defeat of the entirety of NATO through their proxy, Ukraine, the real momentum has actually been more gradually building quietly through China and India. In this way, many of the former Western vassals, the Petrodollar gulf monarchies and Iran, Brazil, Egypt and others have redefined global powers from OPEC, the G7 and The United Nations system and SWIFT financial instrument, to one taking shape and only recently finding actual implrmentation, around a BRICS structure.
Russia and China have sought to urgently diversify from their US Treasury holdings and found great success using gold and their own currency.   Russias oil for gold and oil for Rubles program's along with outstanding diplomacy have allowed them to defy weaponising of propaganda and such through the post Bretton Woods USD institution's.  This includes sanctions and measures by the US Departments of State and Pentagon, The UN, WEF, World Bank, EU, NATO to weaken their global standing.  Moreover, it has only resulted in stronger alliance's in BRICS as the emerging great powers know that they are stronger together and that each needs the other.
South Africa has been a slow starter and has only recently been making bold gestures of overt inclination towards the East as its economic destiny.
While SA's Manufacturing base has not been as supercharged as other BRICS nations and its trade balance is a deficit with BRICS partners, meaning it is still an import heavy nation, opportunities exist with commodities, energy and certain local niches such as the Rooibos tea grown only near the table mountain part of the globe. These are  products whose success in BRICS  is already ordained and only the absence of a gobal marketing  apperatus has left them unrealised.
This is what is missing from SA, and is the next step to take now that SA has been bolder it admitting publicly its BRICS aspirations and  in some cases even openly defied the US  attempts to them  to  heel.
Watch this space!
TRADE
There is no single formal "BRICS trade agreement," but rather a framework for economic cooperation with agreements on specific areas like customs and energy efficiency, supported by institutions like the New Development BankSouth Africa's trade with other BRICS nations is growing significantly, but it also faces a persistent trade deficit. The BRICS Business Council serves as a platform for the private sector to facilitate trade and investment, with a goal to create a more business-friendly environment. 
What is the BRICS Framework?
  • An informal association: 
    BRICS began as an informal alliance of economic powers and has evolved into an association that supports economic cooperation and the Strategy for BRICS Economic Partnership. 
  • Key institutions: 
    The group has established the New Development Bank (NDB) for financing infrastructure projects and the BRICS Business Council to connect the business communities of member nation
  • No single trade bloc: 
    While focused on trade and investment, BRICS is not a formal trade bloc with a comprehensive, legally binding agreement. 
South Africa's Trade with BRICS Nations 
  • Growing importance: 
    BRICS nations are significant trading partners for South Africa, with substantial growth in both exports and imports since 2016.
  • Trade deficit: 
    South Africa has continuously recorded a growing deficit in its balance of trade with other BRICS economies, which has more than quadrupled since 2010, according to Business Tech.
  • Key beneficiaries: 
    Significant growth in South African exports to China has been a primary contributor to the overall trade increase.
Opportunities for Trade and Investment
  • Market access: 
    The BRICS framework aims to develop market access opportunities and inter-linkages between member countries. 
  • Agribusiness interest: 
    The South African agricultural sector is particularly interested in leveraging BRICS to boost exports of products like fruits, wine, wool, and beef to China and India. 
  • Conduit to Africa: 
    South Africa's developed infrastructure, including ports, railways, and logistics networks, positions it to act as a conduit for trade and investment into the wider African continent. 

The Real Reason The West Hates Putin Will Surprise Most People


During the 20th Century the Soviet Union produced many significant social and technological achievements and many innovations. Soviet military technology in some areas, particularly defense systems like the Soviet S300 (which STILL outperform the latest U.S. Patriot ground to air system by some margin) were coveted worldwide.  It also had the world's second-largest economy, By 1970, the Soviet economy had reached its zenith and was estimated at 60 percent of the size of the United States in terms of the estimated commodities (like steel and coal). Its oil and gas reserves were, and still are, vast, with certain sectors unmatched globally.


The Soviet Armed Forces comprised the largest standing military in the world. An NPT designated state, it possessed the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world, a statistical title that Russia still holds today. 

The period from the 1970's onwards marked a consistent decline for the U.S.S.R. The reasons for it are mired in an unsatisfactory narrative which prevents any real understanding of affairs, and that same propagandistic narrative persists to this day, even the "red scare" component despite the fact that todays Russian Federation has abandon communism.  With that in mind, I would make the case that it has actually gotten worse despite manifesting once more in a flavour that reminds me of the Cold War despite a few small cosmetic changes. That narrative is stuck. It's the "Capitalism VS Communism" distraction. A polar one-or-the-other fantasy method of summing up a situation typically has about as much nuance as a "Good VS Evil" children's cartoon, the type that insists on finishing every episode with a moral lesson for kids delivered by the hero.  

Cast your mind back to any Cold War era TV montage, with clips of President Reagan yelling "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!".  This was not so much an organic pop culture dynamic as our sense of nostalgia will try to persuade us.  It was a repeated meme, early memetic engineering in the days where social engineering was used sparingly. It is, nonetheless? A form of "Divide and Rule". 
Here is my detailed history of the evolution of this fascinating tactic, and trust me, it's a lot more interesting than you think. 

In the 1990's things reached rock bottom in the former Soviet Union. Gangsterism and suicide were on the rise as Western Capital Finance vultures descended onto (and into) the newly available carcass. By that I mean the reduced remains of the former U.S.S.R. The new "Free Market Economy" simply did not have the maturity to evolve any internal oversight structures able to function as defense mechanisms from the external economic hitmen.  
More problems were found to emerge internally since the new open economy only benefitted a handful of oligarchs. Well, a few oligarchs along with the Russian mob who rose to international notoriety pushing out more settled international outfits with previously unseen levels of violence. The results on the economy any society were severely traumatic and to this day Russians are motivated by political participation shaped by the single and overpowering need to never again have their fate at the disposal of special interests whom they do not understand or trust.

NA.T.O. was at this point defunct.  The fall of the Soviet Union should have seen it retired, since the official reason for its existence was no more.  The real (unofficial) purpose of the Trans-Atlantic arms manufacturers club was to expand the MIC grift from the U.S. tax base to the entire Western tax base. It follows logically. The more people, the more taxation available to be plundered.  You still need an enemy to justify a threat response, but that need was only apparent to me in the shorter term since they were cooking up the "War on Terror" for that and it was decided to rather feed on the Soviet corpse and make sure it did not re-emerge as a legitimate threat. After all, perceived threats could be more safely sold to the public. N.A.T.O. saw its chance in the 1990's for acting on its secret expansionist agenda, all the while refusing the new Russian Federation even so much as an option to join, which not many people even know about. For the largest arms dealers in the West, selling maximum arms requires maximum enemies, and terror threat being cooked up from the Middle East wasn't quite ready. 

So the situation in the new Russian Federation was not looking good.  Whichever way you slice it there were serious problems, and greedy, calculating forces had put into action a series of events that were supposed to balkanize the territory, leaving its economy plundered.  It was to become a Western vassal in every possible sense. Without being overly dramatic, the once great nation stood on the precipice of doom.

Enter Putin.


For the sake of brevity let's look at the highlights reel only. Russian annual household income increased from an average of $800.00 p/a to over $30 000.00 during the course of Putin's leadership. During the same period, the West (while asleep at the wheel) found itself suddenly and depressingly involved in corporate state capture and economic plunder, with random woke agendas shoved down their throats for good measure.

By the time the 2008 economic crises was being resolved by Obama blatantly robbing taxpayers to bail out the banks, Russians were instead witnessing state crackdowns on corrupt oligarchs, multinational corporations who were known to disregard public health were ejected from the country.  Globalist financial interests and foreign meddling were no longer just causing financial disaster, they had collaborated with intel agencies and were involved with actual psyops.  Case in point is whereby sewing discontent in Georgia they had been funding a separatist movement that at one point was a major threat.  Well, this type of thing needed to be nipped in the bud, and it was. It was ruthlessly crushed by the new Russian leader who it appeared did not get the script.

This upstart had gotten it into his head that his policies would be shaped in the national interest. 
Under Putin jobs, law and order, culture, identity and pride were slowly restored. Efforts to destabilize the territories bordering the Russian Federation from within and externally were managed, less notorious but still corrupt oligarchs and the mob were brought to heel. Syria was basically rescued from Western and Saudi supported terrorists by Russia, forming a bond and affinity between the two nations.  The Russian President has obtained a cult like status in some sectors for resuscitation of the nation's economy under the most hostile conditions unimaginable.

This is no small feat. I picked up long before there was any traction for it in alternative media discourse that any plan for Russia to succeed would involve neutralizing threats that were actively seeking to cause it harm.  It was not Russia that was naive and too trusting of the West by this point, it was the Western leaders who were surely thinking that this one was in the bag naively believing the naivety of Putin, of this I am certain even though Putin to this day will not admit it for reasons of political expediency.  If you don't believe me then take a look at my reasoning at the time and consider how it played out.  There is only one scenario that makes sense, and it makes a lot of sense.  I have elaborated in quite a bit of detail exactly what the plan was and also regularly reported on its success as well as regularly pointed out the failure of the Western leaders to come to terms with strategy that appeared, at least to me, to understand that success would not be possible unless key strategic Western hegemonies were disarmed of the financial and military weapons it possessed, so long as there was intent to do harm to Russia. Select the "Russia "or "Putin" labels below this post or follow the links I have embedded in this post, the important recent ones being here, here and here.

To this day the plan is still not grasped, even by the alternative media, judging by what I am hearing about "War of Attrition" as if it were only a battle tactic in the recent Ukraine vs Russia conflict which is really a proxy war Russia is waging against N.A.T.O.  Reasons for the slow Russian advance are analyzed in depth, they discuss how hard the ground is and the winter freeze, waiting for Ukraine's counter-offensives to run out of steam, the fact that they are focused on the Donbass for humanitarian reasons or the belief that Putin is secretly holding out for a peace deal.

All he is doing is demilitarizing NATO!

Let's be serious for a second here, Putin couldn't care a flying stuff about any peace agreement with any of these snakes in the grass, even if he ultimately enters into one, it will be against a background where Russia controls the variables that decide whether Ukraine ever become a threat again.  Trust, viewed as unrealistic by Putin, would not be required, so why would that be important?  Part of the reason for the invasion was to eliminate the need for trust and rather be in control of outcomes viewed by Russia as an existential threat. It's noteworthy that Putin does take seriously any pressure exerted by its allies, particularly BRICS nations, that is something to be mindful of, especially since the architecture of the new global payments system is something Putin spends far more time on than the war. Russia has the BRICS presidency this year and at the end of October in Kazan a summit is being held where vital technical discussions around global payments and security are to be ironed out.

Regarding the lead up to war, Putin observed the outsourcing of Western manufacturing to China and elsewhere, and he modernized the Russian MIC to ensure they were prepared to win in output of artillery in a race for escalatory dominance knowing Western stocks run on a "just in time" logistics and stockholding policy since their MIC is purely bottom line in structure.   He also has a very clear grasp of the political appetite for expensive wars on the voting public and know in Russia the population does not see defense at  war profiteering and support would only grow when engaging on military spending if it is to fortify Russia against her enemies.  His calculus of political damage, expense, threat posed by advanced N.A.T.O. weapons systems and the logistics/industry of war being able to produce and sustain

This was happening the whole time that Russia was trying work with his "partners" in the West, and it upset Russians he was using such terms for those trying to destroy him.  In the background do you not think the move to establish BRICS, stockpile gold, dump US Treasuries, corner the oil and gas markets by planning output with OPEC Nations like the Saudis, destroy the Petrodollar, provide support to Iran/ Africa/Syria/The Houti's etc. Make no mistake about it, survival meant disarming the aggressor.

Because once more the West is being played, it is the West that is STGILL BEING NEUTRALISED, disarmed of its weapons, artillery, its public appetite for war by Russia.  Putin knows the west has outsourced its manufacturing  

The perception among those paying attention is that with Putin at the helm the Russian Federation had done an about turn from the naive victim it was after the Cold War collapse. The Russians learned the hard way. Now they have outplayed the West in every arena. They outplayed the criminal plunder puppets who extort as much from their people as possible, eroding the manufacturing and industrial heart of the West with vulture capitalism fostered by the globalization of war, agriculture, syndicated media and finance. Putin has protected his economy from such vultures, invigorated its manufacturing base, tied its currency to energy and gold while ditching debt-based holdings of an increasingly suspect promise to pay, the USD treasury bonds. 

Russia has been a guiding light in the formation of BRICS providing the global South with a demonstration that resistance IS NOT futile and that we are stronger together. Militarily Russia is patient and has learned from the past. In the Ukraine proxy war, the entire NATO arsenal lies as a smoked ruin on the Ukraine countryside as the West turns its focus to aiding a genocide currently being committed by its ally Israel.  

Putin has not only defeated the West against all odds, but he has also done it while they tried to destroy him, somehow succeeding during that chaos to create the kind of trajectory the Western tax bandit globalist neoliberal cabal could only dream of.

They live in fear of being defeated despite holding all the cards only to have the man they demonized succeed at every aspect of their failure. There can be no defeat more comprehensive and no justice more in line with karmic sentiment than that.

And that backstory should allow the case to make itself.   The real reason the West hates Putin has nothing to do with freedom, democracy or prosperity because that is precisely what they have taken from the West, and no amount of projection will convince Russians otherwise, they believe their lying eyes and in a cultural quirk do not distinguish between projection and confession. All the data is transparent and clearly reflects my analysis as does everyday reality for every Russian I have spoken with. The demonizing of Putin is so far removed from reality, and it requires such overt and shameless lying that there was never any risk of it being taken seriously in Russia, and citizens were beginning to keep a keen eye the foreign affairs escapades of the US alphabet agencies and its department of state.
It was duly noted that the spy era rigor and excellence had vanished from the US intelligence community and armed forces.  The objectives of all discretionary spending on national budget issues was motivated by greed and corruption.  Without a peer competitor or threat, the vast resources dedicated to prevailing in the US/USSR contest of influence, all of those assets had to reassess their focus.  None were prepared to forfeit their funding and each would instead find new arenas to ply their covert strategy of classified operations.

What followed was an endless series of expensive, bloody insurgent or proxy wars or direct invasions.  They mainstream media at this point was also fully captured and persisted with its reporting of these wars as failures, ill thought out and executed with no apparent regard for any objectives, means to achieve them or exit strategies.  This is nonsense of course.  These wars were by far the most successful wars in history when seen through the lens of a criminal who has just removed all oversight, accountability and due process from the US Apparatus of state.  No short term victories, long and expensive, provide cover to covert black ops, enrich the MIC contractors, crush all free markets with sanctions, all democracy with globalization, all prosperity with austerity, all sovereign states with open border nightmares, all energy policies with IPCC pseudoscience, all health policies with mandates to make refusing state medication illegal and reclassifying your blood as the for-profit plaything of big pharma.  Russia by contrast has moved in the opposite direction.  Even Russian press have noticed this.

Despite the fact that there is no such thing as government money, only taxpayer money, civil servants in the US had transformed into a freshly emerged civil overclass.  Its former boss, the US taxpayer, was now but a minion and his money through a sense of megalomaniacal entitlement, would no longer be spent maintaining his roads or being invested in the future of national health or education.  Public spending policies would now be up for auction and each bill passed in Washington would be available to the highest bidder.  The polite term for such a system is a "lobby system" and in true Orwellian fashion conventional wisdom will explain how it is a system designed to give voice to the voiceless.  To make sure the little guy is heard.  In reality of course the opposite is true.

In short, despite the thirty years of reasoning I have given, in essence there is one major reason the West hates Putin: It is under his leadership that Russia has been on the opposite course of the West. That is what it comes down to. That is an almost scientifically rigorous way of cutting to the point.

Russia Discovers World's Largest Oil Reserves

 

If you think the geopolitical landscape is a total mess at the moment, you won't get too many objections from me.  Last century there was a war over the Falklands between Argentina and Britain, and there remain background tensions that we don't hear much about.  It may surprise people to learn that two nations went to war over an island with about 3000 British Citizens living on it, but it will make more sense one you discover how near Argentina they are, and how near to Antarctica too.

The penny will drop when you are reminded that the international treaty preventing a nation using its claims being prospected in antarctica comes to an end in 2048, and the Argentinian (now British) claim sits on enough oil to make a nation the next Saudi Arabia.

Furthermore, over the last 25 years most global volatility has instead been as a result of about ten key factors.

Five of these could have a case made as five variations on one theme:

  • Strategic oil and gas reserves/pipelines
  • Tension between Russia and the West/NATO.
  • The Rise of BRICS and the future of the USD as reserve currency.
  • Petrodollar hegemony. With regard to the above, the use of USD international trade is driving up foreign USD demand & particularly the energy sector since oil is by far the largest traded commodity. 
  • Russia and China have moved to trading in local currencies and look to expand this, particularly in the long term with new BRICS member Saudi Arabia. (The Saudi's are already combining their OPEC weight with Russia for strategic expediency and could conceivably corner the market)
So, when I come across a story that one could easily scroll past if not paying attention, but on second glance contains all the ingredients above (potentially), I usually like to make a note or diarize it for
assimilation over.  This blog is that diary, so have a read and file it somewhere in your mind, its not likely to be all over the headlines.


Let's just say that if Putin requires leverage in the event that the British and EU move forward with seizing Russian assets held in various Western financial institutions, it would appear that options are presenting themselves to offset all those billions.

DWAHTS Awards 2023


The 2023 year end awards

 I have decided to launch  my inaugural DWAHTS year end awards. 

...so let's get cracking

1) Media/Sport/Science 

The most banned, censored or ignored award: 

The award that guarantees you are on the right track.

JACKSON HINKLE

Jackson is young and fearless enough to have been thrown off every platform I followed him on, I think his presence still endures on Rumble and X, where I notice his followers only seem to grow. 

Truth-teller Award: 

JIMMY DORE

His podcast, unlike Jackson's, somehow survives on YouTube, serving as a modern-day miracle. 

This survival on the most censorship-heavy platform boggles the mind since his unyielding "go for the jugular" style doesn't allow any room for compromise. This survival has seen him call out even the softball cultural figures like Cornel West and RFK.


Award for popularity & influence

TUCKER CARLSON

Since being fired from Fox News, he has gone from strength to strength. Just recently he got Alex Jones reinstated on X just by interviewing him. His rise this year has culminated in the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN).



Twat of the year:

PIERS MORGAN

This Zio-cuck tosspot endures as Rupert Murdochs project to create a snobby twat and parade him as an ironic champion of the working man. It doesn't work because snobby twats like him are the reason that the working man is so screwed today. Being arrogant and rude on top of that isn't edgy, it's being a c#nt. Shouting matches on TV are not compelling viewing, they are the obvious contrivance of a ponce with disdain for the everyman looking to rub their faces in their own disenfranchisement and then lament the injustice of not being lauded for it.

Guest/Appearance of the year:

BASSEM YOUSSEF


Award for the years most epic revenge. 

NOVAK DJOKOVIC

Djokovic was a close runner up for man of the year and for good reason. After being prevented from playing for over a year (at 36 that should have been the end of his career) he came back with one of the best and most dominant seasons ever winning 3 of the 4 grand slams, all the biggest masters 1000 events and the Year end ATP finals played in Round Robin format by the top 8 in the world. He won a record 7th ATP finals and extended his own record in Slams and Masters, finished over 400 weeks as the worlds top ranked player and another year end #1 blowing out all records held by Pete Sampras, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Djokovic is now the undisputed GOAT of tennis. The only record of any significance that still eludes him is Jimmy Connors record for total tournaments won, 109,  and he is only 5 away from that. If he was not sidelined for the Vaccine nonsense he would have already surpassed it.


Hypocrite of the year:

BEN SHAPIRO

After making a career out of lambasting the left for their record suppressing free speech, this little bitch immediately devoted all his energy to suppressing free speech after October 7th.



Scientific achievement of the year:

CHANDRAYAAN 3/ India

India got to the moon and collected more data than any preceding nation at 1/50th of the cost.


Chandrayaan-3 is the third mission in the Chandrayaan programme, a series of lunar-exploration missions developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation. 
The mission consists of a lunar lander named Vikram and a lunar rover named Pragyan, similar to those launched aboard Chandrayaan-2 in 2019. Wikipedia
Start date: 14 July 2023
Distance driven: 101.4 m (333 ft)
Launch mass: 3900 kg
Manufacturer: ISRO
Orbital insertion: 5 August 2023
Power: Propulsion Module: 758 W; Lander Module: 738 W (WS with Bias); Rover: 50 W
_______________________

2) Politics/Geopolitics


Country of the year: 
Military of the year:
Economy of the year:
Leader of the year:
Person of the year:

RUSSIA / PUTIN

Ukraine, Economics, BRICS, Oil and Gas, the Middle East, you name it, Russia has come out on top in every conceivable sphere, and much of the credit goes to Vladimir Putin, what else is there to say.



New leader of the year: 

IBRAHIM TRARORE 

The Burkina Faso leader cuts an imposing figure on the worlds stage and embodies all the qualities of a new African leader.  He has cut all the right deals and played a vital role in kicking French Imperialism out of Francophile Africa especially in neighbouring Niger. 
Most incompetent leader of the year:

OLAF SHULZ/ Germany

For single-handedly deindustrialising Germany and being a total cuck turning the other cheek when supposed ally  the U.S. blew up critical infrastructure in the Nordstream II pipeline.


Most damaging policy:

ANNELINA BAERBOK/ Germany

The German Green Party clown never set a foot right all year.


Economic Award of the year:
Geopolitical Award of the year:

BRICS+



Psycopath of the year:

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU / Israel

I what more can I say about this horrible little man that hasn't already been said?

Labels

Search This Blog

Your Feedback

Name

Email *

Message *