By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission The times call for acting as poets instead of politicians Between unaccountability of elites and total fragmentation of civil society, Covid-19 as a circuit breaker is showing how the king – systemic design – is naked. We are being sucked into a danse macabre of multiple complex systems “colliding into one another,” producing all kinds of mostly negative feedback loops. What we already know for
By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog There must be SOME criteria where the proponents of the Great Lockdown could say, “In hindsight, this was wrong.” It is obviously hysterical to insist that admitting a policy mistake is totally, completely impossible. German fascists are not wiping out Poland, after all. I mean, what if a secret global doomsday machine in Poland gets triggered if global GNP falls below a certain threshold, wiping out humanity? Certainly then
by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog America’s sole enemy during the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was England. Ever since being defeated in that war, England (controlled by the British aristocracy) has tried various ways to regain its control over America. The British aristocracy’s latest attempt to regain control over America started in 1877, and continues today, as the two countries’ “Deep State” — comprising not only the lying CIA and
By Ramin Mazaheri and cross posted with PressTV Part 1 discussed how the West’s coronavirus response totally ignored the needs of their lower classes, and also how Iran’s “Resistance Economy” rejects Western economic liberalism (and neoliberalism) which has always sought to relegate non-Westerners to second-class economic partners. As I have written previously, the West’s corona response is not just murderously mediocre but middle-class – it assumes everyone has a comfortable
by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog It’s the question upon which Western “real” economies have hinged since 2008: will banks actually loan downward taxpayer bailout money – i.e. computer-generated QE dollars/euros – or will they keep hoarding it among themselves and the asset classes frequented by the 1%? However, this concept goes back much further: since 1980 tax cuts for corporations and the richest tax bracket – essentially giving
By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission As a living embodiment of how East and West shall meet, Mahbubani is immeasurably more capable to talk about Chinese-linked intricacies than shallow, self-described Western “experts” on Asia and China. Especially now when demonization-heavy hybrid war 2.0 against China is practiced by most factions of the US government, the Deep State and the East Coast establishment. Distinguished fellow at the National University of
Note by the Saker: I did post this excellent article by Mansoureh Tajik because it presented a view rarely seen in the West: a view from Iran and a view from a deeply religious person. Yes, that is somewhat of a departure from my rule about not discussing medical aspects of the pandemic, but in this case, it was worth it, at least in my opinion. HOWEVER I ask you
By Blake Archer Williams for The Saker Blog “God damn America, not God bless America!” “If we can’t sell our oil,” the Iranians said, “you won’t be able to sell your oil [either]!” This turned out to be more of a prayer than a threat that was actually implemented. The same prayer could be extrapolated for the economy: “If you want to destroy the economy of an entire nation with
By Ramin Mazaheri and cross posted with PressTV So it took a pandemic-plus-lockdown for some in the West to realize that classic economic liberalism on a global scale – i.e. the narrow hyper-specialization of Adam Smith’s division of labor and David Ricardo’s caste-forging theory of competitive advantage – makes a nation economically vulnerable? This epiphany is not novel for those countries which imperialists forced to precariously rely on a single
By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog Paris has been a terrible place to live for over five years now – even tourists can tell. The Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015 (because they just had to draw pornographic pictures of Prophet Mohammad) kicked off a fear-based culture which has culminated in the world’s most over-policed coronavirus lockdown, with over 800,000 citations issued. But it’s been an endless climb of
by postfataresurgo for The Saker Blog A video is circulating in Italy showing an armed policeman abruptly interrupting mass celebration in a small northern italian town in the Lombardy region, ordering the priest to stop the celebration immediately and dismiss the attendees. The priest refuses and goes on with mass, telling the Carabiniere that he has only 13 attendees at mass well distanced between each other and each wearing a
by Pepe Escobar for the Saker Blog (cross posted with the Strategic Culture Foundation) Hybrid War 2.0 on China, a bipartisan U.S. operation, is already reaching fever pitch. Its 24/7 full spectrum infowar arm blames China for everything coronavirus-related – doubling as a diversionist tactic against any informed criticism of woeful American unpreparedness. Hysteria predictably reigns. And this is just the beginning. A deluge of lawsuits is imminent – such
by Pepe Escobar for The Saker Blog (cross posted with the Asia Times) History teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. – Michel Foucault, Discipline
by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog With all this Great Lockdown time off it’s easy to use it poorly, but I did make one good decision: to not write a multi-part series critiquing the nonsense which is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. It’s nonsense not because de Tocqueville was a segregationist, rabid anti-socialist and even recognised by his peers as the quintessential fake-leftist of his era, but because
by Gary Littlejohn for The Saker Blog Implications of Recent Changes in US Monetary Policy Ramzin Mazaheri’s excellent article of 16th April attracted some very interesting comments: https://10.16.86.131/no-the-Dollar-will-only-strengthen-post-corona-as-usual-its-a-crisis-after-all/ This supportive response aims to provide recent relevant evidence that many of the likely changes Mazaheri describes are already happening very quickly. Over the past few months since December, it has become clear that the US Federal Reserve (the Fed, which has
by A. B. Abrams for The Saker Blog The Coronavirus crisis appears set to herald a new era of much poorer relations between China and the Western world, with Western countries having borne the brunt of the fallout from the pandemic and, particularly in the United States, increasingly blaming China at an official level for the effects.[1] Looking at the U.S. case in particular, at first responses to the virus
by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog US bankers caused the Great Recession, and thus the US was the first to suffer economic turmoil. The coronavirus is a novel malady: we now know that it only severely attacks infirm and unstable bodies – it’s not overly facile to graft this idea onto the global economy. Therefore, among Western nations and their client states it is the Eurozone (the weakest link
by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog There is a lot of chatter about how the coronavirus economic overreaction and subsequent US bailouts will end the dollar’s reign as the global reserve currency – such wishful thinking is shortsighted and ignores even recent Western capitalist history. Last November, in a then-boring but now-prescient 10-part series (I socialistically re-interpreted ex-Wall Streeter Nomi Prins’ book Collusion, which chronologically detailed the QE-spreading collusion
by GH Eliason for the Saker Blog It’s a rarity to come across people with a singular focus of helping others and I hope this interview as well as Christelle Neant and Sergey Dzhura really showcases the qualities that drive them. In the course of my work, I don’t normally have the opportunity to write about people in such glowing terms. Francois Modeme is an accomplished lead singer with the
by Jon Hellevig for The Saker blog The coronavirus and related financial crisis ravaging America have revealed the country to be the dysfunctional, borderline failed state that it is. America’s dysfunction is broad in scope but almost entirely traceable to one common origin: the oligarch takeover of the economy, media, healthcare and political system. I have already reported on the first three of these , and here I will dissect what’s so fundamentally wrong
