Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Foreign Policy & News The long and winding road to Dumbass

Dunno what a chinese or Russian neocon is. All I know is the ones we got in state.

I thought the masons were the ones who controlled the level and square?

India has entered an agreement with Russia to purchase oil in rupees. The RUBINR swap line.

Russia will only accept rubles for oil payments. Should be interesting to see how Europe sorts that one out. My guess is a brisk trade in unsanctioned Russian banks. Europeans will have to deposit Euro’s to exchange them for Rubles to get that LNG.

Booting Russia off SWIFT has accelerated the implementation of both Russia’s and China’s nascent competing SPFS and CIP systems respectively. The SPFS system is already up in India. As Hudson pointed out, sanctions often have the opposite effect of hurting your export markets while creating new domestic markets in the targeted country. He gives the example of the late 70’s grain embargo on Russia. The result was Russia got its farming in order and is now the largest exporter of grain (and competitor to US exports) in the world. One wonders how many real new unintended consequences will come out of this NATO Russian proxy war. My guess is it will take time to see if this fight will have been worth it.

One thing looks certain. No pivot to Asia any time soon. Wouldn’t it be hilarious and fitting if the world goes up in smoke it’ll be over a no show jobs program for our latest crooked presidents fail son? Say! Is it ok to talk about that laptop nugget now that the elections over?

“ (Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden said that the world will experience food shortages as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and production increases were a subject of discussions at a Group of Seven meeting on Thursday. “It’s going to be real,” Biden said at a news conference in Brussels. “The price of the sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.”

Biden Says to Expect ‘Real’ Food Shortages Due to Ukraine War


“ Fertilizer prices were already high before the war. They have now reached record levels amid a precipitous drop in Russian supply, according to CRU Group, which analyzes commodity markets. At the same time, more-expensive natural gas, another Russian export and a crucial ingredient in fertilizer-making, has led European fertilizer factories to scale back production.

The result is that fertilizer is about three to four times costlier now than in 2020, with far-reaching consequences for farmer incomes, agricultural yields and food prices.

Fertilizer Prices Surge as Ukraine War Cuts Supply, Leaving Farmers Shocked

There was already an ongoing global fertilizer shortage before the hostilities. Russia is the largest producer of fertilizer in the world. It was noted elsewhere that grain commodity prices are already higher than than it was at the outbreak of the Arab spring.

One wonders if it would have been better to have entered into negotiations on a security framework with Russia as they were insisting on back in December (referring to the initial post of this thread).

Probably not. Putin would have used it to set up the conflict and make it all NATOs fault.

As it stands Putin is entirely on his own. Prices will rise, food supplies become scarce, people will starve and die. Just another day at the office for geopolitical politics.

Money controls everything.

Coulda, woulda don’t make it so.

Russia’s been asking for security guarantees and setting red lines for two decades now. That’s as matter of record wether one wants to cop to it or not or prefers Emanuel Goldstein narratives is a personal preference. We effed around and are finding out how unserious and delusional neocon foreign policy was/is. Conversely, how serious and realist the Russians were/are. Or we goaded them on purpose? Why were we not willing to negotiate a security framework? Seems like our past governments always managed it. Wonder what’s different now?

Anyhow, the monied classes presidential servant’s son laptop problem looks to be blowing up now. The Presidents got dirty fingers in a very dirty country thru his son and those there monied players, neocon or whathavya. If the far right takes control of Congress and senate there’s going to be an interesting opportunity for impeachment payback. My guess is another round of escalation to try and take the heat off. A mysterious chemical attack seems possible and is getting repeated from the US side. Are the Nazis listening? Sounds ideal to internationalize the conflict. Something Zelensky’s been trying to do from the outset of the war.

An interesting historical perspective and it’s relevance for events taking place today:

“
It’s common just now to see these events as a temporary roadbump on the route to a future of business as usual, or to blame them on the supposed personal villainy of Russia’ds President Vladimir Putin. Such evasions are as easy as they are hopelessly mistaken. They betray, among other things, a stunning ignorance of history, since this is hardly the first time that an era of economic globalization has shattered under the pressure of geopolitics. Several thoughtful writers have already noted the parallels between the present crisis and the collapse of Victorian economic globalization a century ago.”

The End of the European Age

These neocons and their neoliberal fellow travelers… all gas, no brakes. I think they were told to many times how special they were at the schools they attended. It looks as though we’re all going to pay the price of having indulged this cohort now dominating state, security and think tanks. The suicidal tendencies of the rich ruling classes?

Well yes. Part of "business as usual" is competition.

And some of the other large nations in the world are competing for a bigger slice of the pie.

That means somebody else gets a smaller piece...or everybody agrees to an equal slice.

Yeah, let’s say you’ve agreed that geopolitics is a zero sum game for arguments sake (I don’t agree, btw).
What’s amazing to me I’d how were going about it. I don’t see an upside to this gambit of maintaining our pie slice. Trying to keep a soon to be impoverished Europe in our economic sphere and stop its eastward gaze by the inability to do contract law (undermining several agreements, seizing assets and reserves of a sovereign country, weakening your dominant currency and causing widespread economic, political and agricultural chaos seems a funny way to maintain your slice.

Smells like failure and desperation. A very dangerous combo for people with hands on levers.

The other problem with the pie argument is- who’s pie?

Last I looked, our country is becoming increasingly impoverished starting with de industrialization . That’s now coming to the vassal states in Europe.

Russia didn’t deindustrialize. Or China. Last I looked, our drywall screws come from China. We scrapped our B&S screw cutting machines decades ago along with the working classes that ran them. Not everyone got that retraining to become iPod designers, financial planners or diversity training consultants.

Seems like a foreign policy in conflict with economic policy to me.

No, they didn't. They de-humanized instead. In service to industry.

You don't hear folks over there asking for a sustainable wage, free education, and M4A.

They don't ask for anything. They just work in the sweatshops turning out drywall screws.

Like we used to do here. Until they fall over dead.