Donald Trump threatened tariffs on BRICS, claiming the group is "dead", but it is growing. 10 members and 10 partners participated in a summit in Brazil, discussing dedollarization and decolonization.
Is BRICS perfect? No, but they are making incremental steps, not in a straight line but zigging and zagging, towards an economic network free from the shackles of AngloEuroZionist neocolonial parasitism.
Trump constantly brags about ending the BRICS, but everything he does backfires worse on himself. TACO!!!
He bombastically bloviates as though he is some sort of virile turgid rooster, but in reality he is just an impotent flaccid cock.
Regarding the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, Ben omitted to mention the triggering event, which was the preceding Yom Kippur War, in which the US proxy Israel kicked the asses of the Arabs (yet again). The pissed off Arabs then embargoed oil exports to the West in retaliation. However please remember that US Peak Oil production occurred in 1971 and the USA in 1973 was still near peak output and still the largest producer of oil in the world. Nevertheless it was also the largest oil consumer because the USA was the largest industrial and agricultural producer in the world then, all run by oil, and needed oil imports to slightly top up the huge domestic US production. Note that the OPEC embargo resulted in only a 5% shortfall of oil availability in the USA, yet the price of oil at the pumps went up MORE THAN 4 TIMES!!!! Why? Because the US supply-demand equation was exquisitely sensitive to oil availability then, because US wealth was intimately tied to real world output of commodities then, which depended on real world oil inputs. This is far less applicable to the US today because of the financialisation / deindustrialisation of today's US house-of-cards economy.
Why did Saudi Arabia agree to the US Petrodollar scheme in 1974? If Faisal had been assassinated before that, one may argue that it was CIA regime change that had persuaded the Saudis, however Faisal was killed in 1975, AFTER he had agreed to the US Petrodollar. Nevertheless an MK ultra type CIA assessination in 1975 for other reasons cannot be excluded.
In 1974, the USA made the Saudis an offer they could not refuse. The Saudi regime was a greedy corrupt monarchy only interested in one thing: the preservation of their filthy rich status as ruling royals who could pilfer the oil coffers of their country like their own personal piggy bank. They were shit scared that further military victories by the Israelis over the Arab countries could threaten their status. So the US gave an iron clad guarantee to the Saudi Royals that they would be kept in power in perpetuity by US military might, who would establish US bases in Saudi Arabia to "protect" the Saudis from the dreaded Israeli bogeymen (conveniently ignoring the fact those bogeymen were in fact US proxies). It was a goddamn PROTECTION RACKET, in which the US promised to protect the Saudis from the US proxy, so long as the US got oil for FREE!!! (and also required that oil be sold to all other countries only in USD, which raised the value of the USD and cemented its status as global reserve currency, which nearly fell apart after Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971).
To further reassure the Saudis, the USA would generously sell them advanced US weaponry to protect themselves against the aforementioned Israeli bogeymen (conveniently omitting to mention that even more advanced US weaponry would be provided to the Israelis, requiring that the Saudis would then need to modernise their inventory every year in an endless arms race, the USA laughing all the way to the bank, regularly selling armaments to both sides).
I will not go into other aspects of the Petrodollar such as recycling into US debt securities.
Fast forward to 2023 when Biden tried to persuade the Saudis to maintain the US petrodollar status and forsake all links with China. Result? In 2024 the Saudis declined to renew their 50 year old memorandum of understanding for the US petrodollar status. They have since expressed intent to sell oil to the Chinese for Yuan.
Are the Saudi's still scared of the Israeli bogeyman? Not after the Israelis got their asses kicked by the Iranians and Israel is now teetering on the edge of civil war and social collapse and has already economically collapsed. In fact, the Saudis are more afraid of the Yemenis, who a few years ago forced the Saudis to cease bombing Yemen, because the Yemenis showed they could strike Saudi oil installations with their missiles with impunity. Iran is magnitudes more powerful than Yemen, much more capable of destroying all Saudi oil facilities within minutes. Result? The Saudis brokered a peace deal with the Iranians mediated by the Chinese a couple of years ago.
Why should the Saudis now export their oil only in USD today? Why should they accummulate more US Tbills, stored in US banks, when the US could seize it at any moment, just as the Europeans and US seized $300 billion equivalent of Russian foreign reserves in 2022? This weaponisation of the USD by the USA is the number one reason for countries, particularly oil rich countries, for abandoning the USD, why no amount of cajoling by the USA can restore he Petrodollar status. It was daylight robbery committed by the USA now backfiring on them big time.
Furthermore, why recycle oil profits in US bonds when the US bond market is facing collapse? Even the vassal Japanese recently shed US bonds, the traditional so-called safe haven which is now completely unsafe. What can the Saudis buy with devaluing US bonds, what material goods and commodities does the USA produce other than overpriced underperforming military paperweights and Iron Sieve phony missile defence systems? US bonds represent trillions of dollars of irredeemable US debt which anyone with two functioning brain cells knows the USA will hyperinflate away, to make their irredeemable debt vanish.
On the other hand, what can the Saudis buy with the Petroyuan? Apart from upgraded airports and seaports, high speed electric rail, 100% renewable electricity infrastructure, nuclear power plants, brand new cities, high technology imports (chips, computers, electric cars and buses), military hardware superior to European technology etc etc?
As of now, China is rapidly expanding its blockchain based cross-border interbank payment system (CIPS) which setttles trade in Yuan (RMB) and counterpart national Gulf State or ASEAN currencies, completely bypassing the USD, completing transactions in seconds rather than the not-so-SWIFT old system which takes days, and reducing transaction costs by 98%.
WHY THE US PETRODOLLAR WILL SOON BE DEAD (but will not go gentle into that dark night)
Ben Norton recently delivered a good basic summary as to why one reason for the recent Israel/US twelve day war against Iran was that it was a desperate act to try to restore the US Petrodollar status following Iranian regime change.
Ben offered the audience undergraduate level Petropolitics 101. Unfortunately important gaps need to be filled if you want to achieve postgraduate level comprehension. He said you cannot understand oil markets without understanding geopolitics. Actually, I think the converse applies: you cannot understand geopolitics without understanding the geology, physics and chemistry of oil and gas, which in turn influence international politics and military and economic and financial shenanigans, not infrequently leading to fraudulent scammery in the oil and gas markets. Lies pervade the industry eg OPEC countries massively overstating their oil reserves in 1985 or US scammers massively overstating Monterey shale reserves by 20 times.
With regard to gas, Ben in the past mentioned briefly the massive gas fields off the Levantine coast (Leviathan, Tamar etc) as being an important motivation for the Israelis wanting to expel the Palestinians from Gaza (and sieze southern Lebanon) so the Israelis can claim ownership of all the gas. Easy enough to understand.
Less understood, indeed never mentioned by anyone (except me), is the concept of "I drink your milkshake!" as motivation for the foreign destabilisation of Assad's Syria, especially by Qatar. The idea was dramatically explained in DDL's Oscar winning performance in "There will be blood". He was talking about draaaaaaainage from one oil well into another in the same field, but that concept is waaaay more applicable to natural gas, which moves through porous rock magnitudes faster than oil. I may later post an old article I wrote about it if I have time.
Regarding Ben's current presentation, here is some gap filling:
Firstly one needs to understand that Peak Oil is a physical fact, it is a real world OBSERVATION. It has NOT been debunked as certain ignoramuses like George Monbiot published a decade or so ago. It only appeared to be debunked then because of the large volumes of fake oil (shale LTO, not petroleum) which the USA produced after depleting its domestic conventional oil fields, but as I previously explained, shale LTO was and is a SCAM now on the verge of collapsing along with the hundreds of billions of dollars of associated derivatives.
The USA reached Peak conventional oil production around 1971 (as correctly predicted by M. King Hubbert) and despite a slight uptick in the Hubbert curve a few years later (Prudhoe Bay coming online) it went into terminal decline such that now the USA's conventional fields are essentially depleted. US shale LTO scammery took off from 2008 when the whole world reached Peak / Plateau conventional oil production. Such US scammery was facilitated by the US importing conventional foreign oil for free (courtesy of the Petrodollar status) to extract domestic low EROEI LTO, combined with a 15 year policy of ZIRP, combined with Quantitative Easing, combined with heavy government subsidies, combined with share buybacks by the shale oil scammers to drive up share prices in a PONZI SCHEME, combined with heavy investments from suckers domestically and internationally (eg BHP) who almost all LOST THEIR MONEY. You can make tons of money from the tulip trade of you recruit enough suckers.
Going back to 1953 however, the USA was then producing heaps of cheap high EROEI conventional oil on a rising Hubbert curve at a rate greater than any other country and was truly oil independent. What then was the US motivation to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran when the US truly had zero need for any foreign oil at the time? The US motivation then was NOT OIL, it was 100% political, as a result of manipulation by the British and MI-6. It was not Kermit Roosevelt who masterminded it, even though he wrote a grandiose book about it later taking credit. It was MI-6 agents and it was Britain who persuaded the CIA to bankroll the astroturf coup. Britain had no domestic oil resources but desperately needed cheap Iranian oil to maintain its Industrial wealth. The red-under-the-bed hysteria was raging full throttle then and the Brits told the US that unless that Iranian radical socialist / commie fanatic was deposed, Iran would 100% fall under the influence of the Soviet Union, hence Mossadegh had to be removed by the USA at all costs. So the US motivation for that particular coup was not petroleum, but the British motivation was absolutely 100% about petroleum. After the coup, the risk of the Anglo Persian Oil Company being nationalised by Iran evaporated and APOC then morphed into BP, today notorious for Macondo / Deep Water Horizon, but that is another story.
In former Secretary of State REx Tillerson's words, Trump is just showing "What a fucking moron," he is. The UN is becoming irrelevant primarily because of the US abuse of its veto power; whereas, the powerful and influence of BRICS+ is growing and will continue to grow. We will no when the multipolar world has taken over when the dolar is dethroned.
peddling B*S* and counter-propaganda as a career? Well Done! Less we forget - The common devotions of BRICS and Non-BRICS are called
FO$$IL CAPITAL
Infinite growth on a finite planet (Devotion to Capitalism)
BOTH BRICS and Non-BRICS symbolize a vicious continuous destruction of the Earth. Why jackA$$ media sirens like yourself never gain any ecological sanity or even insight, is not even a question.
Is BRICS perfect? No, but they are making incremental steps, not in a straight line but zigging and zagging, towards an economic network free from the shackles of AngloEuroZionist neocolonial parasitism.
Trump constantly brags about ending the BRICS, but everything he does backfires worse on himself. TACO!!!
He bombastically bloviates as though he is some sort of virile turgid rooster, but in reality he is just an impotent flaccid cock.
Part 2 of 2
Regarding the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, Ben omitted to mention the triggering event, which was the preceding Yom Kippur War, in which the US proxy Israel kicked the asses of the Arabs (yet again). The pissed off Arabs then embargoed oil exports to the West in retaliation. However please remember that US Peak Oil production occurred in 1971 and the USA in 1973 was still near peak output and still the largest producer of oil in the world. Nevertheless it was also the largest oil consumer because the USA was the largest industrial and agricultural producer in the world then, all run by oil, and needed oil imports to slightly top up the huge domestic US production. Note that the OPEC embargo resulted in only a 5% shortfall of oil availability in the USA, yet the price of oil at the pumps went up MORE THAN 4 TIMES!!!! Why? Because the US supply-demand equation was exquisitely sensitive to oil availability then, because US wealth was intimately tied to real world output of commodities then, which depended on real world oil inputs. This is far less applicable to the US today because of the financialisation / deindustrialisation of today's US house-of-cards economy.
Why did Saudi Arabia agree to the US Petrodollar scheme in 1974? If Faisal had been assassinated before that, one may argue that it was CIA regime change that had persuaded the Saudis, however Faisal was killed in 1975, AFTER he had agreed to the US Petrodollar. Nevertheless an MK ultra type CIA assessination in 1975 for other reasons cannot be excluded.
In 1974, the USA made the Saudis an offer they could not refuse. The Saudi regime was a greedy corrupt monarchy only interested in one thing: the preservation of their filthy rich status as ruling royals who could pilfer the oil coffers of their country like their own personal piggy bank. They were shit scared that further military victories by the Israelis over the Arab countries could threaten their status. So the US gave an iron clad guarantee to the Saudi Royals that they would be kept in power in perpetuity by US military might, who would establish US bases in Saudi Arabia to "protect" the Saudis from the dreaded Israeli bogeymen (conveniently ignoring the fact those bogeymen were in fact US proxies). It was a goddamn PROTECTION RACKET, in which the US promised to protect the Saudis from the US proxy, so long as the US got oil for FREE!!! (and also required that oil be sold to all other countries only in USD, which raised the value of the USD and cemented its status as global reserve currency, which nearly fell apart after Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971).
To further reassure the Saudis, the USA would generously sell them advanced US weaponry to protect themselves against the aforementioned Israeli bogeymen (conveniently omitting to mention that even more advanced US weaponry would be provided to the Israelis, requiring that the Saudis would then need to modernise their inventory every year in an endless arms race, the USA laughing all the way to the bank, regularly selling armaments to both sides).
I will not go into other aspects of the Petrodollar such as recycling into US debt securities.
Fast forward to 2023 when Biden tried to persuade the Saudis to maintain the US petrodollar status and forsake all links with China. Result? In 2024 the Saudis declined to renew their 50 year old memorandum of understanding for the US petrodollar status. They have since expressed intent to sell oil to the Chinese for Yuan.
Are the Saudi's still scared of the Israeli bogeyman? Not after the Israelis got their asses kicked by the Iranians and Israel is now teetering on the edge of civil war and social collapse and has already economically collapsed. In fact, the Saudis are more afraid of the Yemenis, who a few years ago forced the Saudis to cease bombing Yemen, because the Yemenis showed they could strike Saudi oil installations with their missiles with impunity. Iran is magnitudes more powerful than Yemen, much more capable of destroying all Saudi oil facilities within minutes. Result? The Saudis brokered a peace deal with the Iranians mediated by the Chinese a couple of years ago.
Why should the Saudis now export their oil only in USD today? Why should they accummulate more US Tbills, stored in US banks, when the US could seize it at any moment, just as the Europeans and US seized $300 billion equivalent of Russian foreign reserves in 2022? This weaponisation of the USD by the USA is the number one reason for countries, particularly oil rich countries, for abandoning the USD, why no amount of cajoling by the USA can restore he Petrodollar status. It was daylight robbery committed by the USA now backfiring on them big time.
Furthermore, why recycle oil profits in US bonds when the US bond market is facing collapse? Even the vassal Japanese recently shed US bonds, the traditional so-called safe haven which is now completely unsafe. What can the Saudis buy with devaluing US bonds, what material goods and commodities does the USA produce other than overpriced underperforming military paperweights and Iron Sieve phony missile defence systems? US bonds represent trillions of dollars of irredeemable US debt which anyone with two functioning brain cells knows the USA will hyperinflate away, to make their irredeemable debt vanish.
On the other hand, what can the Saudis buy with the Petroyuan? Apart from upgraded airports and seaports, high speed electric rail, 100% renewable electricity infrastructure, nuclear power plants, brand new cities, high technology imports (chips, computers, electric cars and buses), military hardware superior to European technology etc etc?
As of now, China is rapidly expanding its blockchain based cross-border interbank payment system (CIPS) which setttles trade in Yuan (RMB) and counterpart national Gulf State or ASEAN currencies, completely bypassing the USD, completing transactions in seconds rather than the not-so-SWIFT old system which takes days, and reducing transaction costs by 98%.
Summary: The US Petrodollar is faaaarked.
Other resources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zr5h12-OlA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLTrph5JREs
WHY THE US PETRODOLLAR WILL SOON BE DEAD (but will not go gentle into that dark night)
Ben Norton recently delivered a good basic summary as to why one reason for the recent Israel/US twelve day war against Iran was that it was a desperate act to try to restore the US Petrodollar status following Iranian regime change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ziGNmvOh6k or
https://podbay.fm/p/multipolarista-146684/e/1751365186
Ben offered the audience undergraduate level Petropolitics 101. Unfortunately important gaps need to be filled if you want to achieve postgraduate level comprehension. He said you cannot understand oil markets without understanding geopolitics. Actually, I think the converse applies: you cannot understand geopolitics without understanding the geology, physics and chemistry of oil and gas, which in turn influence international politics and military and economic and financial shenanigans, not infrequently leading to fraudulent scammery in the oil and gas markets. Lies pervade the industry eg OPEC countries massively overstating their oil reserves in 1985 or US scammers massively overstating Monterey shale reserves by 20 times.
With regard to gas, Ben in the past mentioned briefly the massive gas fields off the Levantine coast (Leviathan, Tamar etc) as being an important motivation for the Israelis wanting to expel the Palestinians from Gaza (and sieze southern Lebanon) so the Israelis can claim ownership of all the gas. Easy enough to understand.
Less understood, indeed never mentioned by anyone (except me), is the concept of "I drink your milkshake!" as motivation for the foreign destabilisation of Assad's Syria, especially by Qatar. The idea was dramatically explained in DDL's Oscar winning performance in "There will be blood". He was talking about draaaaaaainage from one oil well into another in the same field, but that concept is waaaay more applicable to natural gas, which moves through porous rock magnitudes faster than oil. I may later post an old article I wrote about it if I have time.
Regarding Ben's current presentation, here is some gap filling:
Firstly one needs to understand that Peak Oil is a physical fact, it is a real world OBSERVATION. It has NOT been debunked as certain ignoramuses like George Monbiot published a decade or so ago. It only appeared to be debunked then because of the large volumes of fake oil (shale LTO, not petroleum) which the USA produced after depleting its domestic conventional oil fields, but as I previously explained, shale LTO was and is a SCAM now on the verge of collapsing along with the hundreds of billions of dollars of associated derivatives.
The USA reached Peak conventional oil production around 1971 (as correctly predicted by M. King Hubbert) and despite a slight uptick in the Hubbert curve a few years later (Prudhoe Bay coming online) it went into terminal decline such that now the USA's conventional fields are essentially depleted. US shale LTO scammery took off from 2008 when the whole world reached Peak / Plateau conventional oil production. Such US scammery was facilitated by the US importing conventional foreign oil for free (courtesy of the Petrodollar status) to extract domestic low EROEI LTO, combined with a 15 year policy of ZIRP, combined with Quantitative Easing, combined with heavy government subsidies, combined with share buybacks by the shale oil scammers to drive up share prices in a PONZI SCHEME, combined with heavy investments from suckers domestically and internationally (eg BHP) who almost all LOST THEIR MONEY. You can make tons of money from the tulip trade of you recruit enough suckers.
Going back to 1953 however, the USA was then producing heaps of cheap high EROEI conventional oil on a rising Hubbert curve at a rate greater than any other country and was truly oil independent. What then was the US motivation to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran when the US truly had zero need for any foreign oil at the time? The US motivation then was NOT OIL, it was 100% political, as a result of manipulation by the British and MI-6. It was not Kermit Roosevelt who masterminded it, even though he wrote a grandiose book about it later taking credit. It was MI-6 agents and it was Britain who persuaded the CIA to bankroll the astroturf coup. Britain had no domestic oil resources but desperately needed cheap Iranian oil to maintain its Industrial wealth. The red-under-the-bed hysteria was raging full throttle then and the Brits told the US that unless that Iranian radical socialist / commie fanatic was deposed, Iran would 100% fall under the influence of the Soviet Union, hence Mossadegh had to be removed by the USA at all costs. So the US motivation for that particular coup was not petroleum, but the British motivation was absolutely 100% about petroleum. After the coup, the risk of the Anglo Persian Oil Company being nationalised by Iran evaporated and APOC then morphed into BP, today notorious for Macondo / Deep Water Horizon, but that is another story.
Part 1 of 2...
In former Secretary of State REx Tillerson's words, Trump is just showing "What a fucking moron," he is. The UN is becoming irrelevant primarily because of the US abuse of its veto power; whereas, the powerful and influence of BRICS+ is growing and will continue to grow. We will no when the multipolar world has taken over when the dolar is dethroned.
BRICS is doing what America should have done 60 years ago. Poor old Trump doesn't know the party is over.
peddling B*S* and counter-propaganda as a career? Well Done! Less we forget - The common devotions of BRICS and Non-BRICS are called
FO$$IL CAPITAL
Infinite growth on a finite planet (Devotion to Capitalism)
BOTH BRICS and Non-BRICS symbolize a vicious continuous destruction of the Earth. Why jackA$$ media sirens like yourself never gain any ecological sanity or even insight, is not even a question.
Now get lost!