Europe’s Anti-Russia Sanctions a Stupendous Act of Self-Harm and Loathing
Strategic Culture Foundation | December 11, 2020
New data out this week indicates that the European Union has suffered aggregate economic losses amounting to over €120 billion due to its policy of imposing sanctions against Russia. That’s according to figures released by the Dusseldorf Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Yet European leaders at an EU summit this week again called for the extension of sanctions on Russia, which will roll on into the middle of next year and probably beyond that date. This lockstep action by the bloc is only leading to more tensions with Russia and taking a political direction to nowhere except more conflict. Those EU sanctions were first imposed in July 2014 over dubious allegations of Russia’s malign involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. Moscow has rightfully reciprocated with counter-sanctions on European exports of agriculture and other goods.
The German Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimates that the entire stand-off has hit EU economies with losses of €21 billion every year. The biggest loser is Germany’s economy which forfeits nearly €5.5 billion a year in bilateral trade with Russia.
Accumulated over six years since 2014 the EU’s sanctions policy against Russia has resulted in a staggering total loss of over €120 billion. And counting.
To put that figure into some perspective, it would be comparable to the combined annual military budgets of Europe’s three biggest economies: Germany, Britain and France.
Or to put it another way, this week the European leaders agreed on a landmark stimulus package worth €1.8 trillion for the 27-member bloc to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. The economic loss to the EU from sanctions on Russia is of the order of 10 per cent of that record stimulus effort.
It is therefore mind-shuddering why the European Union persists in inflicting such untold damage to its own economy through its policy towards Russia.
The EU claims that sanctions are being extended because of the lack of progress in peace negotiations over the Ukraine crisis. Brussels is seeking to blame Moscow for that ongoing frozen conflict, oblivious to the fact that Russia is not a party to the conflict. It is a member of the so-called Normandy Format overseeing the Minsk Peace Accord signed in 2015. Germany and France are also members of the Normandy group. The group has not met since one year ago. So, why is Russia being singled out as the sole responsible for lack of progress in settling the Ukraine conflict?
Secondly, the Ukraine crisis was instigated by a coup d’état against the elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The coup was orchestrated by the United States and European allies, which ushered in an ultranationalist regime in Kiev with disturbing links to Neo-Nazi factions. Hostility towards Russian-speaking communities in the Ukraine then led to the Crimean referendum in March 2014 appealing for reunification with Russia. It is simply preposterous and cynical for the European Union to blame Russia for subsequent turmoil when the EU is itself directly complicit in fomenting the crisis.
In any case, rigidly applying sanctions is counterproductive to a diplomatic solution. Mutual dialogue is precluded by a policy of recrimination and scapegoating.
The EU sanctions policy is self-defeating and suffused with contradictions. It imposes measures against Russia with seeming insouciance about the huge damage being done to EU businesses, workers and farmers, and it does this without any clear justification. Yet this week EU leaders led by Germany refused to impose sectoral sanctions against Turkey in spite of repeated calls by EU members Greece and Cyprus for such measures as a means of defending their territorial integrity from Turkey’s aggressive gas exploration in the East Mediterranean. So here we have EU members protesting against threats to their sovereignty from Turkey; yet the EU leaders show little resolve to defend the bloc’s external southern borders by taking a tough sanctions line towards Ankara.
There is evidently a strange double-think when one compares the EU’s gung-ho attitude towards Russia over a matter in Ukraine which is not even part of the EU and a matter that is highly contested in terms of the allegations being made against Russia.
How to explain such an irrational, anti-Russia policy by the European Union?
One has to conclude that the EU is slavishly following a policy determined by the United States. The US has imposed its own bilateral sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine, as well as many other equally dubious claims, such as alleged electoral interference. The Europeans are thus deferring to Washington’s foreign policy of hostility towards Moscow, even though the economic losses felt by the Americans are negligible compared with those of Europe due to the latter’s geographic proximity and traditionally much greater trading relations with its continental neighbor.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted this week that the European Union’s policy is “centered on the United States”. Lavrov lamented that the EU under current leadership shows no sign of acting independently from Washington. In effect, the European bloc is a vassal under American tutelage.
Ironically, the antagonism towards Russia from the West is due to Russia’s demonstrative independence.
Says Lavrov in a separate interview: “The West’s awareness that Russia is an independent power has had a cumulative effect. Russia will always prioritize its national interests. It is always ready to harmonize them candidly and equitably with the national interests of any other countries based on international law, but it will never be under someone’s thumb.”
The Russian top diplomat added: “The desire to score propaganda points has dominated the West’s foreign policy for a long time, while overlooking the essence of the problems that need a solution in the interests of the peoples of the respective regions.”
A psychiatrist might opine that European self-harming, irrational antagonism towards Russia – while constantly appeasing an American bully – is a form of self-loathing. The EU’s political class resent Russia because the latter is a constant reminder of the independence and integrity that they are so abjectly deficient in.
Russia on track to have one of its largest-ever grain harvests

RT | December 13, 2020
This year’s grain crop in Russia is set to exceed 131 million tons, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. This would be one of the country’s largest harvests, second only to the record 135.5 million tons recorded in 2017.
“Today we can talk about the completion of the harvest season in Russia. Grains are almost completely crushed. So, we can say with confidence that in 2020 our farmers provided one of the most significant harvests in the country’s recent history,” said the head of the ministry, Dmitry Patrushev, during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The latest figures beat earlier expectations. The ministry had said in September it expected this year’s grain harvest to stand at 122.5 million tons.
Russia’s booming agricultural production has surged by 20 percent over the last six years. The country has managed to capture more than half of the global wheat market, becoming the world’s biggest exporter of grain, thanks to bumper harvests and attractive pricing. Since the early 2000s, Russia’s share of the global wheat market has quadrupled. In 2018-2019, Russia delivered 35.2 million tons of wheat to the global market.
Supported by a massive grain harvest, the country is projected to retain its leadership in the world’s wheat market in the coming years.
48% Of U.S. Small Businesses Fear They May Be Forced To “Shut Down Permanently” Soon

By Michael Snyder | The Economic Collapse | December 10, 2020
What would the United States look like if we lost half of our small businesses? The reason I ask that question is because approximately half of all small business owners in the entire country believe that they may soon be forced to close down for good. Not even during the Great Depression of the 1930s did we see anything like this. The big corporate giants with extremely deep pockets will be able to easily weather another round of lockdowns, but for countless small businesses this is literally a matter of life and death. Every day we are seeing new restrictions being implemented somewhere in the nation, and the politicians that are doing this are killing the hopes and dreams of countless small business owners. According to a recent Alignable survey, 48 percent of U.S. small business owners fear that they could be forced to “shut down permanently” in the very near future…
Based on this week’s Alignable Q4 Revenue Poll of 9,201 small business owners, 48% could shut down permanently before year’s end.
In fact, this number jumped from 42% just two months ago, demonstrating how several factors have converged to devastate small businesses: COVID resurgences, forced government reclosures, elevated customer fears, and a surge in online shopping at Amazon and other national ecommerce giants.
When a small business with only a few employees closes down forever, it never makes any national headlines.
But the truth is that small businesses are the heart and soul of our economy, and we are losing more of them with each passing day.
Here are some quotes from actual small business owners that took part in the Alignable survey…
- “COVID has raised its ugly head again. I’m a caterer and I’ve had no work in November and my clients are cancelling for Dec. This is so sad. I have worked so hard to build my business the last 14 years. My business has gone from half a million to not even 200,000. This is devastating for any business.”
- “COVID closings are killing this country! My business is on hold — no art walks or gallery openings, and I can’t even open my studio. Everything’s online.”
- “Because therapeutic massage is so ‘up close and personal,’ I have only come back to about 40% of my previous clientele. I am afraid that the governor will shut us down again, which will be the end of my business. I also believe the ‘ruling elite’ does not care about small businesses.”
How would you feel if you spent years putting everything you had into a small business in order to make it successful, only to have the politicians come along and completely destroy it?
And every time a small business has to let workers go, it just makes the unemployment crisis in this country even worse.
On Thursday, we learned that another 853,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…
First-time claims for unemployment insurance totaled 853,000, an increase from the upwardly revised 716,000 total a week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting 730,000.
I have been warning that the new lockdowns would make the numbers worse, and that is precisely what is happening.
And one expert that was interviewed by CNBC says that this is just the beginning…
“It looks like the unemployment losses are starting to stack up for the economy. It’s not going to be a good month,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank. “You’re starting the first week of the month on a bad note, and it’s probably going to be all downhill from here. It feels like the lockdowns are intensifying. It’s closer to reality for those forecasts that look for the economy to go negative in the first quarter.”
It is also important to remember that there are many Americans that have been unemployed for so long that they are no longer eligible to receive benefits.
One of those long-term unemployed workers is 35-year-old Sarah Groome…
For six months, she received unemployment benefits from the government – but those payments shrank as the programmes wound down this summer. Since October, she’s received nothing.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do financially,” she says. “I’m applying to jobs and I’ve probably applied to over 100 at this point and I’ve had one interview.”
“It’s scary,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
What do you say to someone in her position?
It’s heartbreaking to hear stories like that, and more people are being laid off with each passing day.
And as our new economic depression gets progressively deeper, an increasing number of Americans are becoming very desperate.
In fact, many have already become so desperate that they are turning to shoplifting…
Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken – more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.
“We’re seeing an increase in low-impact crimes,” said Jeff Zisner, chief executive of workplace security firm Aegis. “It’s not a whole lot of people going in, grabbing TVs and running out the front door. It’s a very different kind of crime – it’s people stealing consumables and items associated with children and babies.”
Everywhere we look, our society is starting to break down all around us. Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits more than 70 million times this year, the number of homeless in New York City has reached an all-time record high, and civil unrest continues to erupt all over America.
No matter what happens politically, conditions are going to continue to deteriorate as we head into 2021.
Of course the mainstream media is boldly proclaiming that the new vaccines will pull us out of this tailspin and that life in America will soon return to normal.
You can believe the mainstream media if you want, but in the end the “hope” that they are promising will turn out to be a complete mirage.
Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
The Empire Doubles Down: Open Society Foundations Will Now Be Run by Lord Malloch Brown

By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 11, 2020
The hubris of empire has always struck me with shock and awe.
I mean it really takes balls to get caught with a prostitute and instead of apologizing to your wife, to instead buy the hooker a new fur coat and parade her publicly at a public event.
Such has been the case with George Soros’ long time bosom buddy Lord Mark Malloch Brown who after being revealed as a leading force behind the software used by the infamous Dominion Voting systems via Smartmatic (which transferred its operating systems to Dominion via Sequoia Inc), has now been made the president of Soros’ global Open Society Foundations.
What is the logic behind such a decision?
Simple: If these characters were truly guilty of the crimes they are being accused of, then why would they behave so unapologetically in public? Surely to be so confident, they must be innocent of wrongdoing. It may sound overly simplistic, but this formula has proven most effective in recent years.
This is a lesson learned just a few months go by Sir Kim Darroch (former British Ambassador to the USA 2016-2019). After having failed in his mission to “flood the zone” with British intelligence operatives to influence Trump’s perception of reality, Sir Kim found himself honoured as a Lord and life peer for services rendered rather than face anything close to a reprimand for “exceeding the boundaries of his job description” as one would have expected.
The doubling down of those deep state operatives like Comey, Brennan and Clapper who after having been caught artificially pushing a contrived lie to de-legitimize the 2016 elections under RussiaGate, would become ever more crazed and loud in their advocacy of Trump’s allegiance to the Kremlin.
But this is an old formula that wasn’t invented with Trump. Caught laundering drug money HSBC? No worries. Pay a few dollars in fines, wait a bit, then do it again, but go bigger. Caught orchestrating a color revolution in Georgia? No problem. Just do another one in Ukraine. What happens when your Georgian color revolutionary puppet starts a war with Russia and has to flee his own nation to avoid imprisonment for corruption? Give him Ukrainian citizenship and install him as Governor of the Nazi-infested province of Odessa.
Back to the Soros-Brown Lovefest
Despite these truths, I must admit that the December 4 announcement of Lord Malloch Brown’s rise to the Presidency of Soros’ Open Society Foundations did surprise me.
Knowing that Dominion Voting systems shared its office space with Soros’ Tides Foundation in Toronto Canada was pretty bad. Knowing that Dominion executive Eric Koomer was caught on Soros-connected Antifa organizing zoom calls publicly announcing that he had ensured that Trump would not win was also bad. Seeing the integration of Dominion’s voting systems with a Soros operation known as the Clinton Foundation Delian Project didn’t look good.
When it came to Soros/Malloch Brown characters active in Biden’s aspiring administration, we find the likes of Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Peter Neffenger have found themselves enmeshed in the current coup operation serving as U.S. head of Smartmatic. Other Soros-Malloch Brown connected operatives include International Crisis Group member Jake Sullivan as Biden’s pick for National Security Advisor, Neera Tanden (head of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress) who will head the White House Office of Management and Budget, and lest we forget Anthony Blinken – longtime friend of International Crisis Group President Robert Malley and son of Soros confidante Donald Blinken (whose Donald and Vera Blinken Open Society Archive in Hungary should serve as a constant reminder.)
Yet despite their decades of collaboration and devotion to the cause of destroying sovereign nation states as I outlined in my previous report, Soros and Malloch Brown didn’t make any effort to separate themselves amidst the current surge of U.S. color revolution controversies but have instead doubled down dramatically.
Announcing the transfer of power from Open Society President Patrick Gaspard to Brown, the Open Society website proclaimed:
“Patrick Gaspard has announced his decision to step down as president at the end of the year. During his three-year tenure, he confronted significant threats to open societies around the globe, including the rise of authoritarian regimes and the spread of the COVID-19 virus worldwide. Under his capable leadership, the Open Society Foundations have emerged stronger than ever.
Succeeding him as president will be Mark Malloch-Brown, the former UN deputy secretary‐general and UK minister, who currently serves on the Foundations’ Global Board. Malloch-Brown will take over effective January 1.”
Soros commented on Lord Malloch Brown’s presidency saying: “Mark is deeply familiar with Open Society’s work and shares my vision of a political philanthropy that is focused and prepared for the future.”
What these Globalists Fear
The real threats to their joint vision for an “open society” (code for “technocratic post-nation state world order run by a Malthusian master class”) were enumerated on multiple occasions by both Lord Malloch Brown and Soros. Since the current battle across the globe between Great Reset oligarchs and patriots has coincided with a spike in misinformation and psy ops which have attempted to pin the USA into a war posture with China, it is a good moment to be reminded of what those fears are.
In his June 2020 speech promoting world government, Lord Brown stated: “In the wider world a more authoritarian form of government is the new majority. It is not China alone. This “new majority” embraces leaders who come to power by the ballot box and those who didn’t, but who all share a preference for a nationalist foreign policy, the weakening of domestic institutions and the rule of law”.
At another event a few months later, Lord Malloch Brown warned that the United Nations had been infiltrated by authoritarian nation states like Russia, and China. His solution? Create new transnational operations which “bypass the UN security council”. Apparently, only open society-friendly NGOs are enlightened enough to dictate global policy.
Outlining his understanding of the two greatest threats to “open society”, George Soros had targeted two villains in his January 23, 2020 Davos speech: #1) Xi Jinping’s China and #2: Donald Trump’s USA.
At this speech, Soros stated: “regrettably, President Trump seems to be following a different course: Make concessions to China and declare victory while renewing his attacks on U.S. allies. This is liable to undermine the U.S. policy objective of curbing China’s abuses and excesses.”
At the time Soros spoke, the U.S.-China trade deal had begun its first phase which aimed at ensuring China’s purchase of $200-$300 billion of U.S. manufactured goods. During these hopeful days of collaboration, President Trump understood much better than he does now that 10+ months of COVID insanity and anti-China psy war have flooded his support base, that the ultimate recovery of U.S. manufacturing was contingent upon good relations with China. Trump’s early words of support of Xi Jinping when COVID had newly emerged onto the scene calling the Chinese leader “my friend”, were truly prospects which scared the hell out of Soros, Malloch Brown (not to mention Soros’ right wing doppelganger Steve Bannon who has been set up as a false opposition over the past few years.)
USA-China Synergy is the greatest threat to a Bankers’ Dictatorship
The fact is that the vast markets being created by China’s Belt and Road Initiative provide important zones of demand for U.S. production and vital energy for long term big thinking unseen in the USA since the days of John F. Kennedy. China’s leadership in the multipolar alliance alongside Russia has not only created a foundation of serious resistance to the unipolar agenda, but has also re-awoken for the first time in decades, the multipolar foreign policy traditions that were once emblematic of the USA which I’ve written extensively about here and here and here and here.
This obvious synergy between the two “authoritarian” states of Xi’s China and Trump’s USA was, and continues to be, the greatest fear of those technocrats wishing to castrate nation states on the alter of green decarbonization schemes, world government and never-ending asymmetric wars to ensure that such inter-civilizational cooperative projects as the New Silk Road, be sabotaged under “divide and conquer” strategies. Sure these technocrats sometimes speak well of China, but I assure you that the only thing they admire are China’s centralized controls and surveillance infrastructure which they would love to have applied to control those democratically-minded nations of the west that they seek to dominate. Everything that China does that relates to poverty reduction, large scale infrastructure development, promotion of full spectrum economics abroad, win-win diplomacy, sovereign banking controls, mass education, and frontier creative leaps in science are considered deplorable and only worth destroying.
This is what makes the collapse of U.S. patriotic strategic thinking under an “anti-China” worldview so tragic and dangerous. For all of their courageous work exposing the election fraud and the ongoing 4 year coup attempt of Russia Gate, U.S. patriots like Sydney Powell, Michael Flynn and even Trump himself have demonstrated a tendency to fall for lines of simplistic reasoning that attempt to deflect the causal hand of British intelligence, and instead blame a combined assortment of secondary/tertiary reactive players like Iran and China as the ultimate villains of the story.
Perhaps if people would think a little more seriously about the CIA’s creation and protection of such Asian-scientology outfits like Falun Gong whose U.S.-based leader believes he is a messiah and which controls Epoch Times then they would be a little more weary about accepting every piece of information being slipping into their minds like mental trojan horses.
Perhaps these patriots would also recognize that Falun Gong’s expulsion from China in 1997 was due more to the outfit’s role in attempting to lead a color revolution akin to the Russian White Revolution of 2010 and not due to the CPC’s fear of the spread of “compassion, benevolence and kindness”. They might also realize that Soros/CIA Freedom House’s support for Falun Gong dovetails Bannon’s own collaboration with the same organization bringing both apparent “enemies” into direct synergy. Bannon’s calls for “uniting the global Christian right” under his Dignitas Humanitae Institute (connected to the highest echelons of the European black nobility) under a unified front to prepare for war with Chinese civilization and Islam is just a re-packaging of the neocon clash of civilizations doctrine that has played off of Soros’ anti-human brand of globalism for decades.
What is the carry away lesson from all of this?
Love your nation, and if you are American then defend the presidency from the likes of creeps like Soros, Mark Malloch Brown and Bannon. But keep in mind that the causal hand behind the subversion of the republic (or whatever nation state you might live in) is the same hand which desperately seeks to destroy China, and this same hand can only be chopped off once patriotic Americans and patriotic Chinese begin to work together.
This green fantasy will bankrupt us
By Neil Collins | November 20, 2020
It’s 2050. You wake in your cosy, insulated house, turn on the windfarm-powered lights, cook up a breakfast coffee on the hydrogen stove before jumping into your electric car. You whizz silently along roads with air as fresh as a mountain stream past happy e-bikers and carbon-neutral schools to your heat-pump powered office.
So, viewed from Britain in 2020, can you spot the odd one out? Here’s a clue: the e-bikers get no subsidy. Everything else on this list loses money, and needs state support on a massive scale to get even halfway to the nirvana glimpsed by the prime minister this week. Today’s subsidy, of course, is tomorrow’s tax rise.
Home insulation? £2bn is barely enough to get some sort of programme started. The disruption from insulating your home will be enough to discourage us from taking up this offer, almost regardless of the accompanying bribe. As we saw with double glazing and solar panels, the cowboy installers and fraudsters will be the principal beneficiaries.
Windfarms? The easier sites are already filled up, driving development further offshore to have any chance of quadrupling today’s contribution. The bulk of new contracts are going to overseas manufacturers, while evidence of catastrophic damage to seabirds is growing, and nobody knows the long-term cost of maintaining this hi-tech engineering in a hostile environment.
Hydrogen home cooking? Hydrogen is much harder to handle than natural gas, and a compulsory conversion programme – the only practical way to exploit the existing pipework – would meet stiff resistance. Besides, like electricity, hydrogen is not a fuel but an energy transmission mechanism. Making it from actual fuel is like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Heat pumps? The capital cost typically runs into tens of thousands of pounds per dwelling, even where your garden is big enough to take one. They are also likely to be rather more expensive to maintain than your ‘fridge.
As for the electric car, despite subsidies of thousands of pounds per vehicle, with promises to spend billions more on sockets to charge them, motorists remain suspicious. After all, it is only a few short years since we were being urged to buy a diesel car, to make each barrel of oil go further. Now diesel is officially an evil producer of particulates that kill children.
Reconfiguring the electricity grid for electric vehicles will cost much more than the £2.5bn allocated in the government’s plan. Then there is the £40bn a year raised from fuel duties which will disappear if electricity takes over. It is almost a rounding error in the context of the hundreds of billions which the UK is going to waste with this week’s fashionable projects. They may indeed create thousands of jobs, but then so would digging large holes and filling them in again. Jobs that destroy wealth rather than creating it make us all poorer.
The government’s cheerleaders may argue that no price is too high to pay for “saving the planet”, but this week’s programme, if it is really implemented, will be ruinously expensive. After a year when the UK economy has shrunk by a tenth, we cannot afford more government repression, even cloaked in greenery. A smaller economy makes paying for the NHS, for example, much harder. Worse still, Britain’s self-harm makes almost no difference to global CO2 emissions, when China makes meaningless pledges of good behaviour while building two coal-fired power stations a week. How they must be laughing at us. … Full article
The Sixth Carbon Budget
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 10, 2020
The Committee on Climate Change, the quango headed up by our old friend John Gummer, has just published its latest cunning plan to bankrupt the UK. The Sixth Carbon Budget lays out how we should meet our decarbonisation targets, with specific emphasis on the period 2032-2037.
For the first time they have included estimates of what all of this might cost us in the 2030s. Dressed up in percentages of GDP, talk of green jobs and claims of the economic growth it will all spawn, the CCC have attempted to obscure how much we are all actually going to have to fork out.
They reckon that their plan will involve spending around £50bn annually by 2030, which equates to nearly £2000 for every home in the country. But, as we shall see, even that figure is based on some highly optimistic (some would argue unrealistically so) assumptions.
They say that the £50bn could be marginally offset by savings on electric cars. But it turns out that these are based on a combination of Enron style accounting, and absurdly fanciful assumptions about falling prices of electric cars.
There is, of course, much jam promised tomorrow, or more precisely 2050, when half of us will be dead. But it’s not what might happen in thirty years time that matters to people, it’s the here and now.
But what will all of this mean to the man in the street?
As we already know, the sale of conventional petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2030. According to the CCC, Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) currently cost a third more than conventional cars, typically a premium of £6400.
However, the CCC grandly assume that by 2030 BEVs will cost no more; all of this on the basis that the cost of BEV batteries will drop by two thirds in the next ten years, for which there is not the slightest evidence. Of course, if BEVs do become a lot cheaper, drivers will be queuing up to buy them, and the government won’t need to ban conventional cars!
The CCC also dishonestly include something called “carbon costs” in their running costs for petrol/diesel cars, which amounts to £200 a year per car, or £7bn for the country as a whole. There is, of course, no such a thing as a “cost of carbon”, which is included only to make low carbon alternatives appear more competitive.
When these factors, along with doubts about the second hand value of BEVs, are taken into account, most of the CCC’s fictional savings disappear. All the more significant, because those drivers who are forced to use public chargers are already finding their cars to be dearer than petrol ones to run.
We then come to heating our homes, with proposals that sales of gas boilers are banned by 2033. For most homes this will mean replacement with air source heat pumps, which typically cost around £10,000 to install and require thousands more to be spent on insulation if they are to work effectively.
Quite where ordinary families are expected to get this money from is not explained! To make matters worse, because electricity costs five times as much as natural gas in terms of energy, householders will find that their heating bills double as well.
And if we choose to carry on using our old gas boilers? Simples – we will have a stonking carbon tax added to our gas bills instead.
Not only are we expected to pay thousands out to meet carbon targets, but we are also told we must eat a third less red meat and dairy produce, drive our cars less and take fewer flights. Not that we will be able to afford any of these pleasures after the CCC have done with us.
Eating less meat and dairy will of course cause great damage to British farming, as well as pushing up food bills for poorer families.
And how will we actually power all of these new electric cars and heat pumps? By 2035, we will need nearly twice as much electricity as now, two thirds of which will be coming from wind and solar power, according to the CCC. This is four times the amount of power they generate now.
And when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine? We will have to fall back on gas power stations, with the proviso that they can capture and store the carbon dioxide produced, even though nowhere in the world has managed to do this at scale.
Central to the case for wind power, is that the cost of offshore wind has fallen so much that it is now competitive. However, independent experts, who have looked at the published accounts of companies building these wind farms, maintain that these so-called falling costs are illusory, and that the real costs could be triple those of conventional power generators. If they are right, this would add another £20bn a year to the CCC’s plan.
No longer are these plans decades in the future. Within the space of a very few years, people will begin to experience the financial pain inflicted on them by these proposals, if they are allowed to go ahead.
And all for what?
The UK only accounts for 1% of global emissions, so whatever we do will have no effect at all on the climate. Meanwhile, despite COVID, this year China has continued to build new coal power stations, increasing its generating capacity by 3%. In the last two year’s the rise in China’s emissions of carbon dioxide has exceeded our total emissions.
Will Arce bring Cuban doctors back to Bolivia?
By Lucas Leiroz | December 12, 2020
For the supporters of Evo Morales and MAS, the election of Luis Arce in Bolivia was a great victory. But the challenges for the new president are enormous and opposition to his plans is strong. One of the most recent challenges is to decide about the future of medical cooperation between Bolivians and Cubans. Arce, in the midst of his country’s political chaos, must choose the future of Bolivian health cooperation with Cuba.
For 13 years, thousands of Cuban doctors have been in Bolivia and helped to make up for the shortage of health professionals in this South American country. Altogether, more than 70 million medical consultations were carried out by Cubans in Bolivia. A real dependency relationship was created. Without Cubans, thousands of Bolivians are unable to receive any medical treatment and entire regions of the country are excluded from the national health system, mainly the urban peripheries and rural zones. Even so, shortly after the coup that overthrew Morales, one of the first attitudes of the government of Jeanine Áñez was to expel the brigade of Cuban doctors from Bolivia, as part of the alignment measures with the US planned by the opponents of Morales.
Despite the undeniable benefits of the Cuban presence, Bolivia’s departmental medical schools vehemently reject the Cuban brigade’s presence in the national territory. According to representatives of such departments, the members of the Cuban medical brigades are “supposed doctors” who perform secret activities for the Communist government of Cuba. Another widely used argument is that Cubans “take jobs” that would be for Bolivian doctors. In this regard, the Doctors’ Union announced that health professionals will soon go on strike against the Arce government and that services will only resume if the president maintains the veto against Cubans.
In addition, the La Paz Faculty of Medicine recently stated that it sent a letter to the Ministry of Health addressing the issue of Cuban doctors. The Faculty, like the Union, is directly opposed to the presence of foreign doctors in the country, however, it assumes a more “peaceful” posture, trying to negotiate with the government instead of starting a national strike.
This rivalry between Bolivian and Cuban doctors is not new. During the government of Evo Morales, Bolivian doctors carried out repeated strikes, which lasted for months, resulting in leaving a large percentage of the population dependent on the public health system without an adequate care. There was no statistical study on the case, but it is known that many Bolivians became ill, died, or had serious consequences due to the resistance of doctors to assist them – which is a crime. That is precisely why Arce is acting so cautiously: his goal is to prevent further strikes in the midst of the pandemic.
However, the idea of replacing Cuban doctors with unemployed Bolivian professionals seems to be nonviable. At the time of the expulsion, the Áñez government had declared that it would immediately fill these positions with Bolivian doctors, which never really happened, showing that Bolivia really has no structure to supply the absence of Cuban doctors.
There are a number of factors that must be considered when analyzing this case. First, it deals with a question of quality over quantity. Regardless of the numbers and whether or not there are enough Bolivian doctors to replace the brigades, Cuban medical training is noticeably more appropriate, with the Caribbean country being recognized worldwide for its medical quality. During the pandemic, Cuba sent humanitarian aid to several countries, including developed nations, such as Italy. It is impossible to deny the ability of Cuban professionals – which is usually done only based on ideological assumptions. Still, the numbers of Cuban actions in Bolivia are impressive: more than 70 million consultations, 47,000 laboratory tests and 253,000 surgeries. The main merit of these professionals serving remote regions, where the Bolivian public system has difficulty reaching. Bolivia is a country marked by mountainous and desert regions, where access by health professionals is often difficult. Bolivian doctors most of the time do not arrive in such regions as large urban centers are treated with priority. Cooperation with Cuba met this need.
It is also important to demystify the discourse of Bolivian health professionals that Cubans are “taking their jobs”. This is not true. It is important to remember that Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, with poor education conditions for most of the population. In general, Bolivians who graduate in medicine are part of the country’s economic elite and are, therefore, interested in guaranteeing their own interests, and not those of the population, when they criticize the government and promote strikes and stoppages.
Still, what to expect from professionals who refuse to treat their own countrymen, promoting stoppages of essential services only for political reasons? Apparently, the close links between the Bolivian opposition and the medical centers have reached intolerable levels. In any case, the scenario only tends to get worse.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
China to bail out Iraq in multibillion dollar oil deal
MEMO | December 10, 2020
Iraq is currently deciding whether to go ahead with a multibillion dollar oil deal with China which will bail the country out as part of the effort to solve Baghdad’s worsening economic crisis. The deal comes after SOMO, Iraq’s state agency in charge of oil exports, welcomed bids from various oil traders and companies in a letter issued last month.
That resulted in “several offers” being made by various companies. These were then evaluated by Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, reported Bloomberg, which quoted cabinet spokesman Hassan Nadhim.
In the Iraqi government’s bid conditions, SOMO said that the successful company would purchase four million barrels of oil per month, or around 130,000 per day, with the first year’s supply being paid for up front. The deal is meant to last for five years.
In return for supplying oil to the winning bidder, Iraq will receive $2 billion for a fraction of the promised quantity of oil, with the balance paid later. The barrels of oil are effectively security for a loan.
The winning bidder turned out to be ZhenHua Oil Co., a major state-owned company in China with ties to the Chinese military. It is the latest example of China’s international lending strategy, in which state-controlled banks and trading organisations lend money to oil-rich countries struggling to keep afloat financially, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Angola and now potentially Iraq.
If Prime Minister Al-Kadhimi signs the deal, then it would not be the first time that the company has dealt with Iraq. ZhenHua Oil, which trades around 1.3 million barrels per day of oil and other products, began a joint-venture with SOMO back in 2018 in order to help market Iraqi oil in China to increase exports. That venture was later scrapped.
Iraq’s economy and oil industry suffered greatly from the oil price crash earlier this year, after Russia and Saudi Arabia triggered an oil price war in March over a dispute over oil production.
In September, Iraq’s crude oil exports fell by six per cent and last week its oil minister acknowledged that the industry is in a critical condition due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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Iraq eyes construction deals with China in return for oil sales
Billionaires’ ‘pandemic profits’ alone could pay for $3K stimulus checks to EVERY American – report
RT | December 9, 2020
American billionaires made so much money during the Covid-19 pandemic that their profits since March are enough to give every US resident a $3,000 check without cutting into their pre-virus wealth, a new report shows.
Over the last nine months, the 651 billionaires who call the US home have increased their wealth by a whopping $1.06 trillion, according to a report published Tuesday by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies. Far from being negatively impacted by the pandemic-related economic shutdowns, the country’s super-rich seem to have thrived amid the policies that have plunged so many ordinary Americans into poverty.
The billionaires’ wealth grew so much that they could cut “every man, woman and child in the country” a $3,000 stimulus check and “still be richer than they were nine months ago,” ATF executive director Frank Clemente said in a Tuesday press release.
The report tracked the fat-cats’ profits from March 18, the approximate start date of the economic shutdowns, through December 7. The vast majority accelerated their accumulation of wealth even as ordinary Americans saw their life savings slip through their fingers, losing jobs, businesses, and loved ones to the one-two punch of the coronavirus and the political response.
After nine months of raking in the cash, the billionaires’ total wealth had soared 36 percent to over $4 trillion – nearly twice the $2.1 trillion in wealth held by the poorest 50 percent of Americans.
The monstrous cash-pile amounts to double the two-year budget gap of all state and local governments, a figure estimated to reach $500 billion thanks to the devastating effects of the economic shutdowns on tax revenues. It even approaches the massive sum the federal government spends on Medicare and Medicaid – $644 billion and $389 billion in 2019, respectively, the report claims.
While most working- and middle-class Americans received a single stimulus payment of $1,200 as part of March’s CARES Act pandemic bailout, a promised second stimulus check has failed to materialize. The expanded unemployment program that doled out $600 per week to newly-jobless Americans came to an end in July, and while President Donald Trump issued an executive order to bridge the gap with a less generous $300 weekly payment, Congress has thus far refused to pass a second Covid-19 bailout package even as the rest of the bailout programs are set to expire at the end of the year.
One of the chief beneficiaries of the fiscal explosion has been Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune increased 63 percent since March as locked-down Americans turned to online shopping to meet their needs. The retail tycoon faced sharp criticism over his company’s alleged mistreatment of Amazon warehouse workers in the early days of the pandemic, but had he distributed his $71.4 billion windfall among Amazon’s employees, workers would have received $88,000 each while leaving their boss just as rich as he was before the coronavirus outbreak.
And Bezos, said to be the richest man in the US, wasn’t even the most blessed by Covid-19. That title goes to Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, whose wealth grew by an eye-popping 542 percent – from “just” $24.6 billion in March to $143 billion by December. Musk is about to get quite a bit richer, too, after his StarLink satellite company won a Federal Communications Commission auction to deliver bandwidth to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans.
Senate Democrats circulated a letter earlier this week demanding another $1,200 stimulus payment be part of the Covid-19 aid package currently being debated in Congress. The party has balked at a Republican-authored bailout proposal that would exclude individual payments and include a five-year liability shield for corporations – a measure Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders derisively dubbed a “get out of jail free card to corporations.”

