http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-eu-dema...ty/5396335
Imagine – Argentina – and the rest of Latin America – being urged by the EU, ultimate puppet of the US not to supply Russia with food stuff – vegetables, fruit, meat – after Argentina was ‘punished’ by a corrupt court in New York to pay 1.5 billion dollars to the fraudulent NML Capital et al vulture funds – out of its current agreed upon debt of US$29 billion – equivalent to Argentina’s total reserves.
And yes, the hedge funds have to be paid 100%, when the remaining 93% of creditors agreed on a 20% reimbursement rate. – And, yes, Mr. Griesa, the bought NY judge, has blocked all of Argentina’s payments to the other creditors, unless his vulture clients are paid in full. So, Argentina is in forced default – having to pay now much higher interest rates on international money markets, if she is indeed still eligible for international credits.
Unimaginable but true.
Under these circumstances, the boundless arrogance of Brussels expects Argentina to ascend to the US / EU sanctions on Russia to which Russia responded by banning all imports from the EU? – And is now seeking trading with South America?
Not that Russia really needs food from South America – there is an enormous and willing Asia market open to them. Russia’s gesture is a helping hand to Argentina and South America to free themselves from the economic and political pressures constantly exerted on them by Washington.
Argentina will laugh at such a ridiculously stupid request from the EU.
Good for Russia – and good for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru et al – to finally escape the claws of the predator empire of Washington and go the way of independence, namely towards a new area of economic sovereignty and world monetary system.
Good for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), as they may finally come to a consensus among themselves and issue their own currency, backed by about one third of the world’s economic output and about half the world’s population.
Of course, such a primitive move by the EU begs the questions – have the leaders (sic) of the EU, pushed by the unfathomably senseless mouthpiece of NATO, Fogh (of war) Rasmussen, lost their last shred of sense and sovereignty? – have they indeed degenerated to the level of brainless, spineless dummies? – Do they not realize that if they succeed helping Obama and his blood-thirsty NATO war machine engaging Russia in WWIII that their countries with the countless NATO bases will be the first targets of Russia’s defense? – I.e. – Europe being destroyed – again?
Don’t they realize that Russia, after having been the key liberator of Europe from the Nazi WWII fangs – at the cost of 25 million Russian lives – that Russia not only wants to save Europe from another humanitarian disaster, but would like to help them out of their Wall Street imposed economic disaster by trading with Europe? – That Russia and China would like to form an alliance with Europe – a peace alliance not war alliance à la NATO?
Can’t they – the EU, see the light after Mr. Xi Jinping, President of China traveled to Germany to offer Madame Merkel this spring a New Silk Road, linking Berlin with Shanghai? – An extraordinary potential for economic development throughout Asia, away from the decaying war driven economy of Washington, the Pentagon and the ultra-corrupt financial system dominated by Wall Street the FED and the BIS (Bank for International Settlement)?
Argentina and the other Latin American countries invited by Russia for trading food and other merchandise – most likely will see the light.
If the BRICS are not yet ready with an alternative, dollar delinked currency to replace the western predatory money machine, Russia and China are. The two countries have forged a solid political and economic alliance during the past few years, have a combined GDP of US$ 21.1 trillion (China – US$ 19 trillion; Russia US$ 2.1 trillion – est. 2014), equal to about 27% of the world economic output – US$ 77.8 trillion (est. 2014).
Russia has already announced that the ruble is backed 100% by gold – which is not a reference in itself, but enhances the solidity of their countries’ manufacturing and construction output. This compares with a US GDP of US$ 17 trillion, mostly based on the output of the war and security industrial complex, meaning a GDP of destruction – and on consumption, as well as hollow financial and legal services.
While the BRICS are getting their act together, it is conceivable that Russia and China will issue shortly their own combined currency – the ‘Ruyuan’ or the ‘Yuanru’, delinked from the corrupt, predatory western monetary system; a new monetary alliance could also replace the dollar as reserve currency. Controlling more than a quarter of the world’s economic output and a majority chunk of the Asian market, a combined China-Russian currency would have an infinitely more solid backing than has the fiat dollar – as well as meanwhile also the fiat euro – to become a serious reserve currency. – It is only a question of time until much of the rest of the world will jump on the occasion and abandon the dollar.
All it needs is one country that dares to take this first step – fearless of sanctions, as they are meaningless under a news monetary system.
Argentina would be well advised to switch its payments to the 93% of creditors with whom it reached debt settlement agreements between 2001 and 2010 from the rapacious US-dominated financial system to Russia and China by dollar – yuan and ruble swaps with the two respective central banks – see also
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e39297.htm
Argentina could become the first country to free itself from the economic sledgehammer of the immoral United States – and at the same time enter into trade agreements with Russia and China. Already today 90% of Argentina’s foreign trade takes place outside of the realm of the US dollar.
The question that begs asking is – what will eventually Europe do, when it realizes that it is living on a house of cards that can crumble – and crumble it will – at any time? – What will happen to the Wall Street-FED-Troika (IMF, ECB, EC) lynched Euro, when the people who invented the dollar degenerate into mere brainless greed and war machines? – When they become incapable of thinking by themselves, of recognizing their sovereignty – the highest asset any organized society can claim for itself?
Will eventually the peoples of Europe stand up and get rid of their Washington imposed neoliberal fiefs, grasping the breath of fresh air coming from the East and seeking a healthy alliance, striving for peace and human rights?
It is never too late. Argentina could well become the cornerstone for a new era.
Peter Koenig is an economist and former World Bank staff. He worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, the Voice of Russia, Ria Novosti and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.
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MOSCOW – Russia’s LaitBank could issue approximately 10,000 China UnionPay cards next week, online newspaper Gazeta.ru reported Friday, citing an anonymous source at the bank.
A small private bank, Laitbank entered talks with UnionPay in 2012 and finally obtained the shipment of plastic cards from China on Thursday. The bank’s representative also said they are to receive another 50,000 cards over the next two months.
The newspaper claims a number of top Russian banks, including Alfa Bank, Gazprombank and Bank of Moscow are preparing to start issuing UnionPay cards as well. Sberbank, on the other hand, reportedly plans to focus on developing its own “Pro100” payment system. Additionally, a Russian subsidiary of China Construction Bank is preparing to issue 600,000 UnionPay cards in September, according to the online newspaper. None of the institutions mentioned has confirmed that they will be providing UnionPay bank cards.
Earlier, Vostochny Express and MDM banks also declared plans to issue UnionPay cards.
UnionPay is one of the world’s leading bank card associations, dominating markets in the United Arab Emirates, Thailand and Turkey. In July, Fen Zhiguang, a China UnionPay representative in Russia said the company plans to increase the number of UnionPay debit and credit cards to two million over the next three years. The representative also mentioned that the company has acquired around 30 new partner banks in Russia.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin delivering a speech on the Ukraine crisis in Moscow on March 18, 2014. (Russian government photo)
Official Washington’s “group think” on Ukraine – blaming everything on Russian President Putin – is so dominant that even independent thinkers like Paul Krugman get sucked into the collective misinformation.
When even smart people like economist Paul Krugman buy into the false narrative about the Ukraine crisis, it’s hard to decide whether to despair over the impossibility of America ever understanding the world’s problems or to marvel at the power of the U.S. political/media propaganda machine to manufacture its own reality.
On Monday, Krugman’s New York Times column accepts the storyline that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin instigated the Ukraine crisis and extrapolates from that “fact” the conclusion that perhaps the nefarious Putin did so to engineer a cheap land grab or to distract Russians from their economic problems.
“Delusions of easy winnings still happen,” Krugman wrote.
“It’s only a guess, but it seems likely that Vladimir Putin thought that he could overthrow Ukraine’s government, or at least seize a large chunk of its territory, on the cheap — a bit of deniable aid to the rebels, and it would fall into his lap. …
“Recently Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review suggested that the roots of the Ukraine crisis may lie in the faltering performance of the Russian economy. As he noted, Mr. Putin’s hold on power partly reflects a long run of rapid economic growth. But Russian growth has been sputtering — and you could argue that the Putin regime needed a distraction.”
Or you could look at the actual facts of how the Ukraine crisis began and realize that it was the West, not Russia, that instigated this crisis. Putin’s response has been reactive to what he perceives as threats posed by the violent overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych and the imposition of a new Western-oriented regime hostile to Moscow and Ukraine’s ethnic Russians.
Last year, it was the European Union that was pushing an economic association agreement with Ukraine, which included the International Monetary Fund’s demands for imposing harsh austerity on Ukraine’s already suffering population. Political and propaganda support for the EU plan was financed, in part, by the U.S. government through such agencies as the National Endowment for Democracy.
When Yanukovych recoiled at the IMF’s terms and opted for a more generous $15 billion aid package from Putin, the U.S. government ratcheted up its support for mass demonstrations aimed at overthrowing Yanukovych and replacing him with a new regime that would sign the EU agreement and accept the IMF’s demands.
As the crisis deepened early this year, Putin was focused on the Sochi Winter Olympics, particularly the threat of terrorist attacks on the games. No evidence has been presented that Putin was secretly trying to foment the Ukraine crisis. Indeed, all the evidence is that Putin was trying to protect the status quo, support the elected president and avert a worse crisis.
Moscow supported Yanukovych’s efforts to reach a political compromise, including a European-brokered agreement for early elections and reduced presidential powers. Yet, despite those concessions, neo-Nazi militias surged to the front of the protests on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives. The U.S. State Department quickly recognized the coup regime as “legitimate.”
Since the new regime also took provocative steps against the ethnic Russians (such as the parliament voting to ban Russian as an official language), resistance arose to the coup regime in the east and south. In Crimea, voters opted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a process supported by Russian troops stationed in Crimea under a prior agreement with Ukraine’s government.
There was no Russian “invasion,” as the New York Times and other mainstream U.S. news outlets claimed. The Russian troops were already in Crimea assigned to Russia’s historic naval base at Sebastopol. Putin agreed to Crimea’s annexation partly out of fear that the naval base would otherwise fall into NATO’s hands and pose a strategic threat to Russia.
But the key point regarding Krugman’s speculation about Putin provoking the crisis so he could seize territory or distract Russians from economic troubles is that Putin only annexed Crimea because of the ouster of Yanukovych. If Yanukovych had not been overthrown, there is no reason to think that Putin would have done anything regarding Crimea or Ukraine.
It’s also true that the Feb. 22 coup was partly engineered by the U.S. government led by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who had been an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and who is married to arch-neocon Robert Kagan, one of the intellectual authors of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Before the Ukraine coup, Nuland, was caught in a phone conversation plotting with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine about who should replace Yanukovych. After the coup, her choice “Yats” – or Arseniy Yatsenyuk – emerged as the new prime minister and then shepherded through the IMF austerity plan.
But resistance to Kiev’s new rulers soon emerged in eastern Ukraine, which had been Yanukovych’s political base and stood to lose the most from Ukraine’s economic orientation toward Europe and reduced economic ties to Russia. Yet, instead of recognizing these understandable concerns of the eastern Ukrainians, the Western media portrayed the ethnic Russians as simply Putin’s pawns with no minds of their own.
I’m told that Moscow has provided some covert support for the eastern Ukrainian rebels (mostly light weapons), but that Putin has favored a political settlement (similar to what has been proposed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel). The deal would grant eastern Ukraine more autonomy and accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea in exchange for peace in the east and some financial support from Russia for the Kiev government.
Yet, whatever anyone thinks of Putin or the proposed peace deal, it is simply inaccurate to assert a narrative claiming that Putin provoked the current crisis in Ukraine. The opposite is much closer to the truth. It is thus misguided for Krugman or anyone else to extrapolate from this false premise to deduce Putin’s “motives.”
Krugman, who has been one of the few rational voices on issues of global economics in recent years, should know better than anyone how a mistaken “group think” can create assumptions that will lead inevitably to wrongheaded conclusions.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon andbarnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative
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