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Russian oil shipments hit record high

Samizdat | May 24, 2022

Nearly 62 million barrels of Russia’s flagship Urals crude oil, a record amount, are currently in tankers at sea, according to data from energy analytics firm Vortexa, as cited by Reuters.

However, traders are reportedly struggling to find buyers for some of the cargo as EU countries fail to agree on a possible Russian oil ban. Other buyers have reportedly been shunning Russian crude due to fears of future sanctions.

According to Vortexa, the volume of Urals crude oil on the water is triple the average recorded before February 24, when Russia’s military operation was launched in Ukraine.

“The headline numbers, showing Russian exports are still relatively strong, don’t tell the full story,” Houston-based energy strategist Clay Seigle said, as quoted by Reuters. “Russian oil at sea is continuing to accumulate.”

The number of Urals cargoes at sea with no set destination constitutes 15% of the total, also a new high, Seigle said, adding that some of the oil could be in transit to undisclosed buyers, while others could be unsold cargoes.

Most barrels of Russian crude oil have reportedly headed to Asia, mostly to India and China, while volumes headed to Europe have also increased.

May 24, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | 1 Comment

EU president accuses Russia of energy ‘blackmail’

Samizdat | May 24, 2022

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday accused Russia of “blackmailing” the EU with its oil and gas exports. However, the bloc is in the process of voluntarily cutting itself off from these energy resources, and Moscow has blamed global food shortages on Western sanctions.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, von der Leyen said the EU would “accelerate” its transition to green energy “because of Russia’s blackmailing us with fossil fuels.”

Yet hours before she spoke, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck announced that the EU’s 27 member states would “reach a breakthrough within days” to ban Russian oil imports, upon which many EU states depend. Germany, for example, relies on Russia for around a quarter of its imported oil, while the bloc as a whole sources 27% of its oil from Russia.

Von der Leyen has also promised to reduce the EU’s reliance on Russian gas by 66% this year and eliminate it entirely by 2027, as part of a green energy plan announced last week. At present, 40% of the EU’s gas comes from Russia.

Since the start of its military operation in Ukraine in February, and throughout waves of successive EU and US sanctions, Russia has continued to sell its oil and gas to the EU. Moscow has demanded, however, that importers buy its gas in rubles. More than half of Gazprom’s foreign clients have already opened ruble accounts with the Russian energy giant, according to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak.

Von der Leyen also accused Russia of using “food exports as a form of blackmail,” by allegedly blocking grain shipments out of Ukraine and refusing to export its own supply.

However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that the West’s economic sanctions are responsible for rising global food prices, and that Ukraine is free to export its crop through Poland. Peskov also accused Ukrainian naval forces of mining the Black Sea, making shipments “virtually impossible.”

May 24, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Taking the milk out of babies’ mouths: Food shortages are the new globalist weapon

By Kate Dunlop | TCW Defending Freedom | May 18, 2022

ARE you getting used to the Great Reset? How are you liking the New World Order built on globalist diktat, infection, mass poisoning by inoculation, inaccessible healthcare, inflation, draconian policing, shortages, uncontrolled migration, fear, more fear, and war…

You’ll doubtless be prepared for what’s coming next. It’s not a secret – Bill Gates and his World Health Organisation cohorts have already told us. The next viral releases – Hantavirus, Nipah virus, Marburg, whatever – are all primed and ready to go, together with monkeypox and avian bird flu. All come packaged with their own ‘off the shelf treatments’ from Big Pharma, all guaranteed to be equally as effective as the Covid jabs.

Supply chain problems are already here and will worsen, depending on whatever the next emergency is, and the UK is as well prepared for them as it is for shortages of fuel, gas, and electricity – which is to say not at all.

Now we are being told that a major food crisis is inevitable. Speaking at a Nato conference in Brussels on March 25th of this year, Joe Biden said: ‘Regarding food shortages – yes, we did talk about shortages, and they’re going to be real.’ He’s a man of his word.

Previously the blame was put on ‘climate change’, Brexit, shortages of foreign hands to pick and harvest crops, not enough lorry drivers, lockdowns, the ‘management’ of Covid, and the mass culling of chickens due to bird flu.

Now the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia are delivering shortages of gas, oil, and wheat. Russia and Ukraine together are the largest exporters of wheat and other grains in the world and Russia the largest exporter of oil and gas. Their impact on global logistics and food supply is immense.

At the same time, food production and processing facilities in the US seem to be spontaneously combusting. Since August last year, more than 16 such plants have been damaged by fire.

In September, a meat processor in Nebraska lost five per cent of the country’s beef supply. In March this year, a frozen food plant in Arkansas and a potato processing site in Maine both burned down. Last month, two planes crashed into two food plants, causing massive destruction – one at a General Mills facility in Georgia and another at a potato processing unit in Idaho.

Florida is having its worst orange crop in 70 years, with 90 per cent of trees affected by ‘citrus greening,’ a disease spread by the invasive Asian citrus psyllid bug, which was first found in China, then India and Saudi Arabia. Today, every citrus grove is infected. The impact on farmers already suffering from Covid restrictions is disastrous.

Russia and Belarus are two of the biggest global exporters of fertiliser and fertiliser-related products, accounting for 10 billion dollars activity per annum. The war and the sanctions have damaged the fertiliser market, with prices hitting all-time highs in March.

China’s draconian ‘Zero Covid’ approach and its export ban on fertiliser since last summer has added to farmers’ woes and hit food production costs.

Now it’s baby formula milk, with shortages across the US since February this year. CBS News reports that some 40 per cent of top-selling formula products were ‘out of stock’ at the end of April, according to an analysis from Datasembly.

The Wall Street Journal suggests two reasons for the shortages. It says supply chain issues caused by the Covid-19 pandemic worsened after Abbott Labs, a major formula manufacturer, voluntarily recalled some products and closed a plant in Michigan. Then there was a Food and Drug Administration investigation into complaints related to four infants who were hospitalised, two of whom died.

The White House reaction last week was woeful, with the tone-deaf press secretary Jen Psaki saying the government is ‘doing its best’ and that manufacturers are working at full capacity. In a national health emergency she went on to hint that some mothers are hoarding formula.

But, as with everything in the Magic Kingdom of Biden, things are not what they seem. The legacy media are slow to show locked cabinets in Walmart and empty shelves in other stores, though news that the government is transporting supplies of baby formula to border migrants is beginning to leak, as Tucker Carlson reports.

Eric Boehm, writing in Reason, confirms that although some of the shortages stem from the closure of the Abbott plant, there were already longstanding market problems. A closer look at US trade and regulatory policies shows that government is primarily responsible for the shortages.

According to the New York Times, ‘baby formula is one of the most tightly regulated food products in the US, with the Food and Drug Administration dictating the nutrients and vitamins, and setting strict rules about how formula is produced, packaged, and labelled’.

The US formula market was valued at 3,653 million dollars in 2019 and projected to reach 5,811 million dollars by 2027. The Covid-19 pandemic brought an upsurge in demand due to panic buying on the back of shortage fears.

Rising numbers of American parents are sourcing ‘unapproved’ European formula, even though it attracts an 18 per cent tariff quota. Some are desperate for supply, but others choose European brands because they offer options such as goat’s milk or milk from pasture-raised cows, which are ‘rare or non-existent in an FDA-regulated form in the US’.

Others consider EU products to be of higher quality due to stricter content regulations, including important levels of DHA (an omega-3 fatty acid), which are not required in the US. Almost no American baby formula would meet EU standards and many parents worry about adulteration.

Americans pay well over the odds for European formula, with one website selling product from Germany at 26 dollars for a 400-gram box, about four times the price of the top US formulas.

In April 2021, US Customs and Border Protection agents in Philadelphia seized 588 cases of formula worth around 30,000 dollars. The formula was said to have violated the FDA’s ‘import safety regulations.’ According to Twitter chatter, the FDA issued a fake recall of European formulas in 2021 and has regularly seized legal personal-use shipments.

Plain old natural disaster coupled with bureaucratic interference is not what is going on here. The US baby formula shortage is neither due to incompetence nor maladministration – it is an attack on the most vulnerable in society; part of a deliberate policy to keep chaos bubbling at peak in the service of the Great Reset.

We know what is going on. In 1974, Henry Kissinger said: ‘Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.’

May 18, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , | Leave a comment

The imminent global food crisis is being blamed on Russia, but the truth is rather more complex

Just-in-time supply chains and globalism may lead to global hunger

By Dr. Mathew Maavak | Samizdat | May 18, 2022

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict is undoubtedly impacting global grain supplies, as well as the means of growing crops around the world. But is the looming global food crisis solely Russia’s fault – as spun by the Western media machine?

Only a few months ago, Covid-19, government-imposed lockdowns and climate change were repeatedly blamed for this scenario.

A recent White House Joint Statement by US President Joe Biden and EU leader Ursula von der Leyen clearly singled out the supposed new culprit: “We are deeply concerned by how Putin’s war in Ukraine has caused major disruptions to international food and agriculture supply chains, and the threat it poses to global food security. We recognize that many countries around the world have relied on imported food staples and fertilizer inputs from Ukraine and Russia, with Putin’s aggression disrupting that trade.”

The concept of global food security these days appear as fleeting as Biden’s mnemonic prowess. It has been 12 years since the world was shaken by the Arab Spring, a series of events in which hunger played a significant role, and which, in turn, led to violent uprisings and yet-unresolved civil wars in Libya, Yemen and Syria. Big Tech, Western officials and influencers fuelled this mayhem in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’ but never proffered any concrete solutions. Instead, global hunger grew unabated, while its root causes were explicated through the lens of ‘climate change’ and ‘global governance’.

In the meantime, right at the doorsteps of the Tech giants, the streets of San Francisco were increasingly populated by the homeless and strewn with human faeces and discarded needles from drug abuse. Even a new urban art genre emerged in the form of poop graffiti! Nothing better represents the disconnect between the lofty promises and septic realities of Silicon Valley.

Here is something else for the reader to ponder: Contact-tracing technologies that were used to lock down societies were never trialled to connect the poor to nearby farmers markets, food banks and soup kitchens. A rational person cannot be blamed for suspecting that the intention all along was to eviscerate small-scale farmers, grocers and traders during lockdowns and thereby render citizens prostrate before governments and Big Business. As for technocrats who lap up the smarmy fantasies of the World Economic Forum (WEF), what lessons have they learnt since the fateful Arab Spring?

Here we look at two inexcusable failings of the purveyors of global governance. These are linked to the very issues which Biden and von der Leyen are using to scapegoat Russia.

National granaries

The Arab Spring and its bloody aftermath should have taught governments a lesson about the imperative of establishing new national granaries. Well-maintained facilities can store wheat and corn, amongst other goods, for more than 10 years. Individuals can extend this shelf-life to a whopping 31 years under proper conditions.

Grain stats worldwide also raise questions over government commitments to food security. Global wheat production, for instance, has steadily increased during the last decade. According to a Statista.com brief on Jan 27: “The global production volume of wheat came to about over 772 million metric tons in the marketing year of 2020/21. This was an increase of about ten million tons compared to the previous year. Wheat stocks is [sic] also estimated to increase to about 294 million metric tons worldwide by 2021.”

Dr. Mathew Maavak is a Malaysian expert on risk foresight and governance.

May 18, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | 1 Comment

EU unveils rationing plan

Samizdat | May 18, 2022

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Wednesday that the EU would raise its renewable energy targets and invest billions of euros in clean energy in a bid to break away from Russian oil and gas imports. Consumers will pay a price, however, with the EU’s plan including energy rationing and compulsory solar panels on homes.

Von der Leyen’s ‘REPowerEU’ plan would cut the EU’s reliance on Russian gas by 66% this year and eliminate it entirely by 2027, the bloc’s policy chief told reporters in Brussels.

Under the plan, the EU will increase its Energy Efficiency Target from 9% to 13%, and raise from 40% to 45% the amount of its power generated by renewables by 2030. At present, the EU sources 22% of its energy from renewables.

To achieve this, von der Leyen said that the EU would speed up the permitting procedure for renewable projects such as wind farms and would make €300 billion ($315 billion) available in grants and loans. Of this funding, 95% would be set aside for green energy, while 5% would be used to upgrade Europe’s gas and oil infrastructure to receive imports from sources other than Russia.

However, some of the immediate costs will be borne by consumers. According to the European Commission’s website, households and industry will be required to make “behavioral changes” – such as turning down air conditioning and switching off lights – to reduce demand for oil and gas by 5%. Furthermore, commercial and public buildings will be required to install rooftop solar panels by 2025, with these panels to be made mandatory on residential buildings by 2029.

Some individual member states have already asked their citizens to curtail their energy use. Germany, which depends on Russia for more than half of its gas and was already facing the world’s highest energy costs due to its flawed transition to wind power, has asked its population to shower less and swap their cars for bicycles in order to save costs.

With consumers across the EU already grappling with skyrocketing inflation and record fuel prices, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that European countries are committing economic “suicide” by trying to wean themselves off Russian oil and gas, accusing them of caving to pressure “from their American overlord” without “paying any attention to the damage that they have already caused their own economy.”

May 18, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | 2 Comments

Bill Gates wants to build a dystopia

By Toby Green | UnHerd | May 9, 2022

It’s not easy being a regular multi-billionaire. Bill Gates used to be the simple guy-in-the-mansion next door, worried about virus outbreaks and global warming. Then, during the pandemic he became the point at which all conspiracy theories met.

Ever since March 2020, the memes have spread. Was Gates a mass murderer with a global depopulation agenda? Was he a “biofascist” seeking control over the world’s population through vaccine passports and microchips?

It didn’t stop there. Was the Covid-19 pandemic actually “plandemic”? Did the Microsoft founder and his acolytes create it through funding “gain of function” research in a biosecurity lab in Wuhan? Was it all war-gamed at Event 201 in October 2019?

Bill Gates has not much enjoyed being the focus of these stories for the past 18 months. He just wants to help out. He wants to solve problems so badly, he tells us early on in How To Prevent the Next Pandemic, that in February 2020, he flew from Seattle to South Africa to participate in a charity tennis match, no doubt on one of his four personal jets.

It was in South Africa that he first began to join the Covid-19 dots. The tech entrepreneur delivers the story with characteristic flair: “A couple of days after returning from South Africa, I sent an email about scheduling something for the coming Friday night: ‘We could try and do a dinner with the people involved with coronavirus work to touch base.’” Gates is happy, “everyone was nice enough to say yes — despite the timing and their busy schedules”. His work on the pandemic begins.

Now Gates is tired of all the conspiracies. He asks his critics to judge him by his actions. And the best way to do so is by reading the book: does Gates have anything sensible to say about the best way to combat future pathogenic outbreaks?

His model for the future is built on what he feels has worked over the past two years: isolate contacts, close borders, lockdown as quickly as possible, then remove restrictions slowly and cautiously. He cites Dr Anthony Fauci, who Gates says he spoke to once a month during the pandemic: “Not only should you appear to overreact at first, as Tony Fauci said, but you also have to be careful about relaxing all NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] too soon.” Meanwhile, you should invest enormous sums in boosting global public health systems, vaccine production in poor and rich countries, and fund a Global Pandemic Emergency Response Unit to monitor potential outbreaks. The aim, says Gates, is to vaccinate the entire world — twice if necessary — within six months while lockdown measures restrict the spread of the new pathogen.

It all sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Or it might do to those who haven’t seen the footage of Shanghai’s lockdown circulating on social media, to those who can work online in relative comfort, or indeed to billionaires with comfortable gardens and libraries in which to while away those six months. With the Gates model, a little translation is in order.

The massive investment required to make this vision happen is a good starting point. Where will it come from? Gates is a well-known philanthropist, and makes much of the more than US$2 billion which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have ploughed into fighting Covid-19. Yet this is a small amount compared to the US$6 billion that the US government has invested in the Moderna vaccine alone. As Gates points out, “Most of the world’s greatest talent for translating research into commercial products is in the private sector… It’s the government’s role to invest in the basic research that leads to major innovations, adopt policies that let new ideas flourish.”

Translation: taxpayers invest in developing products through government agencies, and private companies and their shareholders reap the profits. How does this work in practice? Gates does not give what we might call full disclosure. He offers the example of the antiviral Molnupiravir which “Merck and its partners developed”. It was authorised to great fanfare as a Covid treatment in November 2021.

Yet Merck did not develop this drug. It was initially developed as a veterinary drug for horses at Emory University, with a US$19 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID and funding from other sectors of the US government. Molnupiravir costs US$17.74 per dose to manufacture, according to an estimate from researchers at Harvard and King’s College London, but is being retailed to the US government for US$712 per course — a profit of 4,000%.

Another example of Gates’s eye for detail is his discussion of Remdesivir, which was approved as “Standard of Care” for Covid in the US by the Federal Drug Agency. Again, like Molnupiravir, much of the funding and institutional support for the drug originally came from the US government. Remdesivir was the baby of the drug company Gilead.

Gates describes how one study showed that “it may have a major impact in patients who aren’t yet sick enough to be in the hospital”. But other details are ignored. He doesn’t tell us that in an earlier, peer-reviewed study from China, published in the Lancet in May 2020, “Remdesivir was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits”, and that the trial was “stopped early because of adverse events in 18 (12%) patients versus four (5%) patients who stopped placebo early”. All the same, the profits were good: while the drug cost Gilead just US$10 per dose to manufacture, it was being retailed to US taxpayers at US$3,120.

Maybe Gates knows nothing about the Lancet study. Perhaps he doesn’t know that in both of these cases, public investment has funded enormous private profits — and that in the case of one of the drugs, there’s little evidence that this was to any benefit. He’s just a software engineer after all.

For Gates, technology really does provide all the answers, as it certainly has in his own life. He believes humanity belongs online: “once people learn the digital approach, they generally stick to it”. Post-Covid, he envisages a world of flexible working, in which regular guys like him with large mansions and decent living space can languidly choose between going into the office on Wednesdays or Thursdays. The problem with Gates’s digital utopia — full of virtual  spaces where 3D avatars attend business meetings — is that I suspect many of us will not want to live in it.

Gates tries to show in this book that he gets it, while at the same time demonstrating on every page that he just doesn’t. As he draws up his elaborate plans for global governance, Gates writes that he does so knowing that he hasn’t been elected. He tells us he wouldn’t want to be anyway (after all, we can surmise, if he were elected, he might be accountable).

Gracefully, Gates understands that people are angry at the huge increases in wealth disparities during the pandemic, and pledges to return his profits to “make the world a fairer place”. He recognises that poor people across the world have suffered, and are far less able to deal with lockdowns, and even acknowledges that harsh measures might not be a good idea for some of them… And yet he recently went on record as saying that “if every country does what Australia did, then you wouldn’t be calling it a pandemic”. We can, in fact, judge him by his actions, and his words: he says one thing, and funds and promotes others.

Looking forward, the outlook is bleak. Preventing pandemics in Gates-World means shutting down immediately at the “next major outbreak” — a favourite, and alarming turn of phrase. Future semi-permanent global lockdowns are baked-in as the new normal, something I warned of in the conclusion to my book The Covid Consensus. As Gates notes, the WHO have identified 1,500 new pathogens in the past 50 years, and thus the “next major outbreak” surely cannot be far off. In the past 20 years, pre-Covid, there were already three of note (SARS — 2003; Avian Flu — 2005; Swine Flu — 2009). In each case enormous fatalities were falsely predicted, and would surely have led to six month shutdowns in the Gates model.

Gates-World is one where citizens make sacrifices for his model to work. And it’s also one where class is totally ignored. Does Gates know what it was like for Angolan children to be forced to stay at home for seven months in 2020? He admits that internet connections need to be improved to make digital schooling possible — but does he understand that no IT in the world can help children of sex workers in Mumbai slums with their homework? Can he comprehend what it is like to be incarcerated in a flat with small children for months on end in New York, Shanghai or London?

Gates wants to be respected, and understood. His world is one of innovative scientists having dinner with one another. They solve the world’s problems by the pool, or near the barbecue. It’s what he likes doing best, because “I’ve had some of the best conversations of my working life with a fork in my hand and a napkin in my lap” (p4). He wants to fund more and more work leading to experiences like this, and meanwhile turn the rest of human society into a digital avatar of itself.

No doubt he means well. But you don’t need to indulge the conspiracy theories to realise that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Toby Green is a Professor of History at King’s College, London.

May 18, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | 7 Comments

We’re fighting a ruinous proxy war – but for which ‘sort’ of Ukrainians?

By Frank Wright | TCW Defending Freedom | May 18, 2022

SINCE the invasion of Ukraine, we have seen how effective our free world is in marketing. The art of attaching emotions to symbols is the basic method of propaganda, be that to sell products or policies, which was created by people such as American political commentator Walter Lippmann and public relations guru Edward Bernays in the 1920s.

A frenzy of outrage has been conjured over a country and on behalf of its people. Yet this is how the Ukrainian government sees its own people …

The poster reads: Ukraine – open your eyes! Yes – they look like Ukrainians. Sort I, II, III. 

In case you were not aware, according to the Ukrainian regime, there are three sorts of Ukrainian. When we speak of ‘the people of Ukraine’ and their rights, bear that in mind.

The red ‘Sort 1’ on the poster are in Galicia, which may be about to be occupied by the Polish army. There is a statue of Ukrainian nationalist and wartime Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera in Lvov, the regional capital and the base for most Western journalists.

Sort 1 Ukrainians are not native Russian speakers. In Sort 2, there is a minority (less than 25 per cent) who speak native Russian. Sort 3 is the worst offender, because every area here is populated by a majority of native Russian speakers.

In 2010, Sorts 1 and 2 voted for Yulia Tymoshenko. Sort 3 voted for Viktor Yanukovich, who was president until the 2014 coup.

Interestingly, the sorts are also careful to indicate in the second order some of the minority ethnic groups on the Western border. Ethnic Hungarians, Romanians and Moldovans are not Sort 1 either.

One emotional basis for the proxy war the US and NATO are fighting is the right of the Ukrainian people to decide their own fate. Which people – which Sort?

This right was not relevant in 2014 when the US, through its then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, deposed the Yanukovich government and replaced it with one of its choosing.

You can now see why they did this. Yanukovich was not overly friendly with Russia, yet the fact that his base was concentrated in the Russian-speaking population was enough to convince the neoconservative faction that he had to go.

The proxy war is being promoted by this neoconservative faction, which dominates US foreign policy. The founder of their main pressure group, Robert Kagan, is the husband of Victoria Nuland. Kagan admits that US actions provoked Russia. His wife is the architect of many of these provocations, so he would know.

The view of the faction which controls US foreign policy is that Russia and its interests must be broken by any means. This is the reason for the cancellation of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, for the overturning of the election in Ukraine in 2014, for the concentration of arms and military training in Ukraine’s disputes Donbass region for the past eight years.

US policy – as directed by a faction that destroys nations with no regard for the costs, nor consequences for the populations concerned – is to break Russia. Yet there is a problem with this plan. The strategy is failing.

Russia is not collapsing at home. Its economy is resilient and looks to be capable of surviving. The wider world is not sanctioning Russia. Ukraine is not winning the war. A global food crisis looms. This makes escalation likely and the situation ever more perilous. It explains the insane Plan B – destroying Europe.

The sanctions – applied by the Anglosphere, the EU and Japan – are not weakening Russia. The EU seems determined to halt all gas and oil supply from Russia. Hungary, Croatia and Slovakia have indicated this would mean a severe economic collapse. The multinational chemical company BASF warned of the same regarding German industry, saying production will cease with no Russian hydrocarbons.

Many German firms are preparing to litigate the German government owing to the ‘dramatic repercussions’ of cutting off Russian gas and oil. This means whole industries will halt and Germany will deindustrialise. Europe will face food shortages and stagflation – a toxic mixture of economic stagnation and inflation.

You may have missed the fact that Ukraine shut down one (of two) gas transit nodes last week, instantly reducing gas supply. This obviously cannot happen without US direction and approval, as it endangers the ability of German industry to continue to operate. One explanation of US policy is to bleed Europe in order to blame Russia, which in turn builds support for war.

The difficulty here is in finding a rational explanation for the removal of the fuel, grain, fertiliser and raw materials without which European industry and food production cannot continue to function. Gas stores are 37 per cent full across Europe. We have no food mountains any more, and Britain is poised to be the worst hit with stagflation.

It looks as though the collapse of the EU economies might be the plan for the US administration, as there is no other rational explanation for the removal of gas, oil, grain, copper and fertiliser from that market.

There are no replacements. There is no agreement with Qatar to replace pipeline gas with liquefied natural gas (LNG). There is no other source of commercial fertiliser.  Added to this, Russian sweet crude oil isn’t the same as every other type of oil, which matters when your refinery is geared to process a specific type of oil.

That is the argument of Hungary, whose intransigence is explained by the simple fact that even if a replacement could be found for Russian oil, and even if it weren’t more expensive (it will be) – it can’t be processed in its country’s plants.

It is noteworthy that the Hungarian government will speak for the national interests of Hungary rather than cheerlead its own economic ruin.

Yet ruin is what we all face, after two years’ money-printing combined with a sanctions policy that will push the European economies off a cliff. This is a strange way to save Sort 1 – and some of Sort 2 – of the Ukrainian people.

This, however, is the price of a failed US initiative to weaken Russia, whose rouble is higher now than it was when the war began, and whose gas and oil is more valuable than ever. Is it a price we are willing to pay? Perhaps it is time to ask who is selling us this future, and for what purpose.

May 17, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | , | 2 Comments

Russia moves to withdraw from WTO, WHO

Samizdat | May 17, 2022

Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, is planning to discuss the potential withdrawal of the country from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), according to Pyotr Tolstoy, the vice speaker of the parliament.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a list of such agreements to the State Duma, and together with the Federation Council [upper house of parliament] we are planning to evaluate them and then propose to withdraw from them,” Tolstoy said on Tuesday.

The vice speaker said that Russia had already canceled its membership in the Council of Europe, and that leaving the WTO and WHO is next.

“Russia withdrew from the Council of Europe, now the next step is to withdraw from the WTO and the WHO, which have neglected all obligations in relation to our country,” he said.

Tolstoy added that the government is expected to revise Russia’s international obligations and treaties that do not currently bring any benefit but directly damage the country.

In April, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the “illegal” restrictions placed on Russian companies by Western states run counter to WTO rules, and told the government to update Russia’s strategy in the organization by June 1.

The decision came amid the sweeping Western sanctions imposed on Moscow over its military operation in Ukraine launched in late February. Since then, Russia has been subjected to around 10,000 targeted restrictions, making it the world’s most sanctioned country.

May 17, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | 6 Comments

EU Introducing ‘Suicidal’ Sanctions on Russian Oil and Gas Under Pressure From US Overlords: Putin

By Ilya Tsukanov | Samizdat | May 17, 2022

The European Union is introducing sanctions against the Russian oil and gas sector for “absolutely political reasons” and under pressure from the bloc’s American overlords, notwithstanding the impact on its collective economic competitiveness, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

“Rejection of Russian energy resources means that Europe will systemically become the region with the highest energy costs in the world. Yes, of course prices will rise and resources will go to this region, but it will not be possible to radically alter the situation. This will seriously – and according to some experts irrevocably – undermine the competitiveness of a significant part of European industry, which is already losing the competition to companies in other regions of the world,” Putin said, speaking at a meeting with officials devoted to energy issues on Tuesday.

Putin suggested that the Western political class had speculated “on the absolutely natural concerns of many people on the planet with climate issues,” downplaying the importance of traditional, hydrocarbon sources of energy, while simultaneously overestimating the effectiveness of alternative energy in filling the gap.

This, he said, helped to spark the current energy crunch that Western officials are now trying to blame on Russia.

“Today we see that for absolutely political reasons, due to their own ambitions and under pressure from their American overlords, European countries are imposing more and more sanctions on the oil and gas market. All of this causes inflation, and instead of admitting their mistakes, they are looking for the guilty party in another place,” Putin said.

“One gets the impression that our Western colleagues, politicians and economists have simply forgotten the foundations of the elementary laws of economics, or, to their detriment, prefer to deliberately ignore them,” Putin suggested.

“Obviously, together with Russian energy resources, economic activity will also be leaving Europe for other regions of the world. Such an economic auto-da-fe, or suicide, is of course the internal affair of European countries. We must proceed pragmatically and proceed primarily from our own economic interests,” he added.

Putin called on authorities to “act proactively” in light of the “ill-conceived and chaotic” decisions being taken by some of Russia’s Western “partners,” and to use them to Moscow’s advantage. He also warned that Russia should not expect the West to make such mistakes “endlessly.”

Putin promised that the Russian state would do “everything that depends on us” to create the proper conditions for the work of domestic energy companies, ranging from improving logistical capabilities to providing a system of payment in national currencies and improving the availability of credit and insurance services, to stimulating the processing of raw materials and the creation of new domestic technologies.

He urged Russian oil companies not to sit on their assets – including revenues gained from rising energy prices, and said that the changes currently being experienced by the global oil market have a “tectonic nature,” and that “doing business as before, according to the old model, of course, seems unlikely. In the new conditions, it is important not only to extract oil, but to build the entire vertical chain up to the end consumer.”

Countries worldwide have experienced economic shocks associated with rising energy costs over the past year, with the United States and the the European Union bearing the brunt of the burden, particularly after regional leaders began slapping sanctions and other restrictions on Russian oil and gas amid the crisis in Ukraine starting in February. Many EU countries depend on Russian gas for more 40 percent or more of their natural gas needs and a similar amount of oil. In the wake of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, the bloc has promised to replace supplies from Russia with fuel sourced from the US, Africa and the Middle East, and to ramp up investments in alternative energy. However, economists, businesses and opposition leaders have warned that these measures won’t save the region from a recession, a depression, or worse – its deindustrialization amid the intensifying global economic competition between China and the United States.

May 17, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | 1 Comment

European gas prices forecast to triple

Samizdat | May 15, 2022

A “perfect winter storm” may be forming in Europe, as the continent seeks to limit Russian gas flows, analysts at Rystad Energy said in a press release this week. They added there might be not enough LNG to replace Russian gas during the freezing weather. The price of gas in the EU was projected to soar to $3,500 per 1,000 cubic meters.

According to the report, last year Russia sent 155 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas to the continent, providing more than 31% of its gas supply.

“Replacing a significant portion of this will be exceedingly difficult, with far-reaching consequences for Europe’s population, economy, and for the role of gas in the region’s energy transition.”

By shunning Russian gas, Europe has destabilized the entire global LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) market, which began the year with a precarious balance after a tumultuous 2021, Rystad explained. The decision to sharply reduce reliance on Russian gas and LNG from current levels of between 30-40% will transform the global LNG market, it added.

The report highlighted that global LNG demand is expected to hit 436 million tons in 2022, outpacing the available supply of just 410 million tons. “The supply imbalance and high prices will set the scene for the most bullish environment for LNG projects in more than a decade, although supply from these projects will only arrive and provide relief from after 2024,” it said.

According to the research, if Russian gas flows were to stop tomorrow, the gas currently in storage (about 35% full) would likely “run out before the end of the year, leaving Europe exposed to a brutal winter.” Under such a scenario, in the absence of joint buying arrangements and countries competing for limited molecules, the TTF gas price could climb to more than $100 per million British thermal units (MMBtu), resulting in industrial curtailments and widespread fuel switching in the power sector. In an extreme scenario of a severely cold winter, “not even the residential sector would be safe.”

Natural gas prices surged this week after Moscow imposed its first counter-sanctions on some European energy companies. The price of gas in Europe exceeded $1,200 per 1,000 cubic meters during Thursday trading, according to data provided by London’s ICE. Benchmark prices are almost 300% higher compared with a year ago, Reuters reports.

May 15, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | 3 Comments

What Sanctions? Russian Oil Revenues Soar 50%, Hitting A Record High

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | May 12, 2022

And the sanctions hits just keep on coming.

A few weeks after we learned that Russia’s current account just hit an all time high thanks due to soaring commodity exports (just as the US trade deficit blew out to a record high on its own) we learned that contrary to the intentions of European countries, a calculation by a German think tank found that Russia’s oil and gas revenues hit a record high in April, rising to 1.8 trillion rubles in a single month, after 1.2 trillion in March, leading to the following stunning statistics “After only 4 months, Russia’s federal budget has now already received 50% of the planned oil and gas revenue for 2022 (9.5 trillion).”

Today, Bloomberg confirmed this stunning statistic and, citing the latest IEA report, writes that Russia’s oil revenues are up 50% this year “even as trade restrictions following the invasion of Ukraine spurred many refiners to shun its supplies.” Apparently the restrictions – which pushed the price of oil to the highest level in a decade and boosted revenue for oil exporters – is precisely what Putin was hoping for.

Moscow earned roughly $20 billion each month in 2022 from combined sales of crude and products amounting to about 8 million barrels a day, the Paris-based IEA said in its monthly market report.

As we have documented frequently, Russian shipments have continued to flow freely even as the European Union edges towards an import ban, and international oil majors such as Shell and TotalEnergies have pledged to cease purchases. Countering these self-imposed sanctions, Asia has remained a grateful and keen customer, with China and India picking up cargoes no longer wanted in Europe, and doing so at a huge discount to spot.

Even as Russia has kept oil output steady, reduced flows of Russian refined products such as diesel, fuel oil and naphtha have aggravated tightness in global markets, the IEA noted, echoing what we have said virtually every day for the past month. Stockpiles have declined for seven consecutive quarters, with reserves of so-called middle distillates at their lowest since 2008.

For all the disruption, Moscow has continued to enjoy a financial windfall compared with the first four months of 2021. Despite the EU’s public censure of the Kremlin’s aggression, total oil export revenues were up 50% this year.

Hilariously, despite all the posturing and rhetoric, the bloc remained the largest market for Russian exports in April, taking 43% of the country’s exports, the IEA said.

There is some hope yet that Europe’s sanctions won’t be all for nothing: supplies were down 1 million barrels a day last month, and these losses could triple in the second half of the year, the agency estimates. EU sanctions against Russian state-linked enterprises such as production giant Rosneft PJSC will take effect on May 15, and the bloc is moving towards a full ban on the country’s supplies.

“If agreed, the new embargoes would accelerate the reorientation of trade flows that is already underway and will force Russian oil companies to shut in more wells,” the IEA said.

May 12, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | 1 Comment

Russia sanctions will trigger global food and energy crises – China

Samizdat | May 12, 2022

The international sanctions campaign to punish Russia over the Ukraine conflict will backfire, causing suffering by people around the world while failing to promote peace in the former Soviet republic, a top Chinese diplomat has told the UN Security Council.

“Sanctions will not bring peace but will only accelerate the spillover of the crisis, triggering sweeping food, energy and financial crises across the globe,” Chinese deputy UN ambassador Dai Bing said on Thursday in New York. He added that continuing to impose sanctions on Moscow will force children around the world to “suffer the bitter consequences.”

Dai made his comments as the Security Council met to discuss the humanitarian crisis brought on by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Although he also spoke of efforts to help protect children affected by the fighting, such as encouraging Russia and Ukraine to work together to enable more civilian evacuations, he said the only real solution is a negotiated peace deal.

“Achieving peace is the best protection for children,” Dai said. “Dialogue and negotiation are the most realistic and feasible way to reach a ceasefire and to stop the war. The international community should encourage Russia and Ukraine to return to the negotiation track and keep accumulating political conditions for the restoration of peace.”

By instead trying to force a resolution through sanctions, Western nations and their allies are actually causing more harm to children, especially those living in such war-torn places as Afghanistan, Yemen, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel region, Dai said. “China again calls on parties to stay rational and exercise restraint, transcend prejudice and strife, and make unremitting efforts for the early resolution of the crisis in Ukraine.”

The US and its NATO allies have spearheaded the sanctions campaign, trying to isolate Russia and devastate its economy and currency. However, the ruble is actually stronger today than before the Ukraine crisis began, rebounding from an historic low reached in March. In fact, it has been the world’s top-performing currency so far in 2022, even though Russia’s economy is reportedly on track to contract by an estimated 12% this year.

Meanwhile, food and energy shortages are looming around the world, and inflation is at around a 40-year high in the US and parts of Western Europe. President Vladimir Putin claimed on Thursday that sanctions are triggering a global economic crisis, and the blame “lies entirely with the elites of Western countries who are ready to sacrifice the rest of the world to maintain their global dominance.”

May 12, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , | 2 Comments

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