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The World Health Organization is the One Ring to Rule them All, and its written goal, inscribed in fiery letters along both sides of its band, is the Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty. Fashioned by the Dark Lord of the Twenty-first Century, the United States of America, in its own iteration of Mount Doom, it only appears to yield US sovereignty to an external organisation.

In reality and practice, as this article will show, the Treaty will give Washington increased power over the G20 nations — the holders of the other ‘rings’ — and through them the rest of the Western World: not only its people but also its animals, its eco-systems, its resources. This, and not the health of the globe, is its dark purpose.

THE CIVIL WAR

The World Health Organization, which since January 2020 has received $782 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is a corporate-funded and lobbied agency of the United Nations without legal jurisdiction over the populations of its 194 member states — to which it acts, at least in principle, in an advisory role.

But that’s going to change soon.

On 3 March 2022, as lockdown regulations were revoked across Europe and NATO declared its proxy war on Russia, the European Council adopted a decision to authorise the opening of negotiations for an international Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response. Under the terms of this Treaty, the member-states of the World Health Organization will be legally bound to implement restrictions on human rights and freedoms — such as further lockdowns, mandatory face masking, compulsory gene therapy, a system of digital identity and programmes of surveillance and censorship — all on the judgement of the WHO.

The basis of this agreement is Article 19 of the Constitution of the World Health Organization, which states that the General Assembly of the WHO can adopt agreements that, if passed by a two-thirds majority, are binding on all member states. Under these agreements, nation states, including the UK and the 193 other members of the WHO, will in principle concede their sovereignty to decide which restrictions the elected executive and legislature of those nations will impose on their populations.

Crucially, once written into a legally-binding treaty, the efficacy or logic of these so-called ‘measures’ — none of which have been used before as responses to viral pandemics, all of which have been shown to be ineffective and many times more dangerous than the virus — will no longer be open to debate. Instead, the WHO will effectively become a global form of the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, a corporate technocracy to which the governments of nation states can defer when they choose to, and which serves to depict undemocratic forms of governance as technical responses to new crises.

Like the World Economic Forum with which it entered into partnership on 11 March 2020 — the same day the World Health Organization declared the ‘pandemic’ — this unelected and unaccountable international technocracy is the new paradigm of governance to have emerged from under the cloak of the manufactured coronavirus ‘crisis’, and its globalist intentions become more apparent every day.

Behind the facade of democracy represented by our national governments, there is the rule of an increasingly authoritarian international technocracy, of which the United Nations and the European Commission are the models inherited from the past, and the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum are those of the present.

The UK Government and Parliament is ready to sign up to the World Health Organization’s resolution on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, for which more than 70 member-states, including the European Union and the UK, have advocated a strong and legally-binding international Treaty. It appears that, when it serves to expand and increase its power over the national population, the UK Government that was elected to an 80-seat majority on the back of the Brexit referendum is more than willing to cede UK sovereignty to global and technocratic forms of governance intent on reducing us to a neo-feudal form of capitalism.

In practice, however, rather than relieving nation-states of their sovereignty, this Treaty will allow national governments to justify and excuse the devastating consequences of lockdown restrictions, masking mandates, gene therapies and other biosecurity programmes as the technical decisions of an international health technocracy to which it is obligated by international law. When it is adopted, therefore, the Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty will depoliticise and remove from either parliamentary or juridical contestation our governance by the Global Biosecurity State.

Behind its woke principles of inclusivity and a paternal state, ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’ — the slogan that first entered public discourse in February 2021 and was quickly adopted by the G7, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the European Union, GAVI and an ever-increasing number of Western governments, including the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Greece, Serbia, the Ukraine and the USA — is as perfect an expression of the totalitarian aspirations of the Global Biosecurity State as ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ was of the Third Reich.

The adoption of this Treaty by every Western government, without a referendum, parliamentary vote, public debate or mention in the media, demonstrates that the facade of democracy these government struggled to maintain over two years of lockdown and ‘vaccine’ mandates has now been torn down, and we are now at war. And like every war waged by the West since 1945, it was started by the USA. What makes this one different and new is that it is being waged not only against nations not yet brought within the West’s axis of evil — Russia, China, Iran, etc. — but primarily against the civilian populations of the West itself. It is, therefore, as the text of the Treaty makes clear, a civil war, waged by governments against their own people.

The weapons of this war — for which the West’s proxy-war in the Ukraine is the continuation and justification — aren’t tanks and long-range missiles but Digital Identity, Central Bank Digital Currency and Gene Therapy. Its alliances are Agenda 2030 and the Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Treaty. Its campaigns are lockdowns and 15-minute cities. It’s battle-cries are ‘sustainability’, ‘inclusivity’ and ‘biosecurity’. And its peace terms, as we will see, are the complete surrender of the rights and freedoms of the populations of the West to the programmes of our enslavement. Don’t believe me? Then read on!

Read the Whole Article

The post ‘One Healt’, ESG & ‘Sustainable Development’: Inside the WHO’s ‘Pandemic Treaty’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Opposition to “woke” ESG corporatism is snowballing, as Joe Biden and Larry Fink found out this past week. Fink is the billionaire CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $8 trillion under management. He is also one of Biden’s biggest boosters and the most prominent corporate promoter of ESG, the controversial rating system that is pushing companies to adopt “progressive” Soros-style policies rather than carry out their legal and fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders. ESG, which stands for Environment, Social, and Governance, is a scheme aimed at pressuring businesses into joining the politically correct stampede on climate change, decarbonization, sustainable development, and so-called social justice and racial justice issues such as gun control, abortion rights, LGBTQ equity, and critical race theory.

Belated Rally Against ESG Juggernaut

Although ESG has only hit the general public’s radar screens in the past year or so, the ESG program, like most globalist intrigues, has been quietly in the works for decades. (We will return to that important history in a moment.) However, with the dangers of ESG now far more readily apparent, opposition is belatedly forming. Congress is stepping into the breach. State legislatures, governors, and attorney generals are also taking action.

On Tuesday, February 28, the U.S. House of Representatives fired the first salvo aimed at nixing the administration’s ESG program for 401(k) retirement investing, as put forward by the Biden Labor Department’s new rule, known as the “Prudence and Loyalty in Selecting Plan Investments and Exercising Shareholder Rights.”  The Labor rule, crafted pursuant to an executive order by President Biden’s “Executive Order on Climate-Related Financial Risk” (EO 14030) of May 20, 2021, was promulgated to undo President Trump’s executive order banning the ESG impositions on pension funds.

Speaking on the House floor on February 28, Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), the sponsor of the anti-ESG resolution, blasted Democrats for misrepresenting his bill and for failing to protect investors and retirees from the harmful impacts of ESG on their investments. “Nothing in this resolution prohibits an American from allocating their capital from the way they want to,” he noted. But what this resolution will do is stop the Department of Labor from coercing Americans into lower performing, higher fee, less diversified, politicized funds. We must stop the pollicization of allocation of capital…. In 2022, the S&P 500 energy sector ended the year a whopping 59 percent higher than where it started, amid a brutal bear market, in which the S&P 500 overall lost 20 percent! If you’re invested in ESG in 2022, you are a massive loser because you are divested from energy. Stop the pollicization of capital.”

On an almost straight party-line vote, the anti-ESG measure, House Joint Resolution 30, passed by 216 to 204. Representative Jared Golden of Maine was the sole Democrat to join the Republicans on this vote in the House. The following day, March 1, it passed the Senate by a vote of 50 to 46, with Democratic Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia crossing over to vote with the Republicans.

To dump the ESG rule, Republicans utilized the Congressional Review Act, which lets Congress disapprove — by a simple majority vote — a final rule issued by a federal agency if it has not been in effect for more than 60 legislative days. The White House press office says President Biden is preparing to use his veto pen for the first time to cancel this legislation and keep his ESG plan in place.

As we have reported here at The New American (see articles linked below), more than two dozen states are suing the Biden administration over the ESG rule and states are divesting from BlackRock, Vanguard and other asset managers that are pushing ESG.

Long, Dark History of the ESG Stealth Agenda

The foundation for ESG was laid more than 30 years ago by the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD) at the 1992 Earth Summit. For that UN confab in Rio de Janeiro, the BCSD effected a carefully timed release for its book entitled, Changing Course: A Global Perspective on Development and the Environment. Accompanied by the scripted hosannahs of the global press, it introduced much of the world to “responsible investing,” by which was meant a new form of “capitalism” with an enviro-socialist twist.  (For more history on this, see the author’s 1992 book, Global Tyranny, Step by Step: The United Nations and the Emerging New World Order.) The next major step came in 1999, when then UN Secretary-General Kofi Anna went to the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos extravaganza to announce the UN’s Global Compact as a means to promote “responsible business practices and UN values among the global business community.” It claimed the support of thousands of companies, business executives, and “stakeholders” (i.e., paid activists). The following year, 2000, the UN held its Millennium Summit in New York City, which resulted in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs were an attempt to implement piecemeal the UN’s massive, 351-page Agenda 21 – unveiled at the Rio Earth Summit — in a simplified, digestible program of 8 goals, 18 targets and 48 indicators. More woke corporatists signed onto the MDGs, which, we were told, would bring about global nirvana by 2015. But, as we found out when 2015 came along, the UN-WEF globalists simply upped the ante, replacing the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Read the Whole Article

The post Biden’s ESG: The BlackRock-Davos-UN Agenda Gets Smacked by Congress, States, Markets appeared first on LewRockwell.

USDA does not allow animal tumors to enter food chain. But lab-grown meat is made of tumor cells.

According to Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum, ongoing global warming threatens to destroy humanity. Methane, coming from the belches and farts of cows, is a greenhouse gas (GHG). So, cows are a problem!

Fortunately, Bill Gates has a solution for us, explained in this video. We need to stop growing cattle and switch to lab-grown synthetic beef.

The World Economic Forum expects we will eat “synthetic meat” in 16 years. (the article below was written 4 years ago)

Bill Gates made sizable investments in “synthetic meat” manufacturers, expecting to turn a nice profit.

The CNBC article explains that “lab-grown meat,” that is, cell cultures grown in giant stainless vats, is not the same as “fake meat” made of soy or pea protein:

Vegetarians have long touted the ethical and environmental problems with meat production and consumption. Start-ups such as MosaMeat, JUST and Memphis Meats are tissue-engineering meat in a lab to allow people to enjoy being a carnivore without any of the environmental or ethical hang-ups.

Dubbed clean meat, the efforts are distinct from “fake meat,” like the soy protein “chicken” you can find in your grocery store today. Unlike Morningstar or Boca Burgers, clean meat really is meat; it just grows in a lab instead of being part of an animal.

Okay, but what kinds of cells is that lab meat grown from?

Lab-Grown “Meat” is Made of “Immortalized” Cancer Cells

This excellent Bloomberg article (paywall-free link) clarifies that all lab meat is grown as immortalized tumor cells. As the article explains, these same cells are used to produce traditional vaccines.

Thank the biotech revolution. Under the right conditions, animal cells can be grown in a petri dish, or even at scale in factories full of stainless-steel drums. For decades, companies such as Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson have cultured large volumes of cells to produce vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and other biotherapeutics. Now the idea is that we might as well eat these cells, too.

What are these cells?

The big honking asterisk is that normal meat cells don’t just keep dividing forever. To get the cell cultures to grow at rates big enough to power a business, several companies, including the Big Three, are quietly using what are called immortalized cells, something most people have never eaten intentionally. Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous.

The article puts a “human face” on some of these cell lines, for example, the “HeLa line” made from the cervical cancer of Henrietta Lacks:

That’s where immortalized cells come in. They’ve been used in medical research since the early 1950s, when the first and most famous immortal cell line—derived from the cervical cancer cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks—was successfully grown in a lab.

The distinction between pre-cancerous and cancerous cells is relatively minor: cancerous cells, by definition, can float away from the tumor site, travel through the blood or lymph, and start a new tumor (metastases) in another location in the body.

The distinction is important for the clinical outcome of a patient with a newly discovered tumor but involves only a minor bio-cellular distinction.

Don’t worry: Prominent cancer researchers tell Bloomberg Businessweek that because the cells aren’t human, it’s essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all. … And cow tumors sometimes wind up in store-bought ground chuck, too. [not true – tumors are NEVER allowed by USDA inspectors – see below – I.C] Of course, the facts might not matter much if ranchers or other players in the traditional meat industry felt threatened enough to declare a public-relations war. It’s all too easy to imagine misleading Fox News chyrons about chicken tumors and cancer burgers.

Not so misleading! The main problem of growing an endless “lab meat” supply is that normal tissue cells cannot endlessly replicate (see above). There is a limit on how many times they will divide.

Read the Whole Article

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What makes the RAND Corporation’s latest report on Ukraine so significant, is not the quality of the analysis, but the fact that the nation’s most prestigious national security think-tank has taken an opposite position on the war than the Washington political class and their globalist allies. This is a very big deal. Keep in mind, wars don’t end because the public opposes them. That is a myth. Wars end when a critical split emerges between elites that eventually leads to a change in policy. The RAND Corporation’s new report, “Avoiding a long war: US policy and the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict”, represents just such a split. It indicates that powerful elites have broken with the majority opinion because they think the current policy is hurting the United States. We believe this shift in perspective is going to gain momentum until it triggers a more-assertive demand for negotiations. In other words, the RAND report is the first step towards ending the war.

Consider, for a minute, this excerpt from the preamble of the report:

“The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the United States.”

This quote effectively sumarizes the entire document. Think about it: For the last 11 months we have been told repeatedly that the US will support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” The above quote assures us that that’s not going to happen. The United States is not going to undermine its own interests to pursue the unachievable dream of expelling Russia from Ukraine. (Even the hawks no longer believe that is possible.) Rational members of the foreign policy establishment are going to evaluate Ukraine’s prospects for success and weigh them against the growing likelihood that the conflict could unexpectedly spiral out-of-control. That, of course, would serve no one’s interest and could ignite a direct clash between Russia and the United States. Also, US policymakers will decide whether the ballooning collateral damage is worth the expense. In other words, are the ruptured supplylines, the rising inflation, the increasing energy and food shortages, and the declining weapons stockpiles a fair trade-off for “weakening Russia”. Many would say, “No.”

In some respects, the RAND report is just the first in a long line of falling dominoes. As Ukraine’s battlefield losses mount –and it becomes more evident that Russia will control all the territory east of the Dnieper River– the flaws in Washington’s strategy will become more apparent and will be more sharply criticized. People will question the wisdom of economic sanctions that hurt our closest allies while helping Russia. They will ask why the United States is following a policy that has precipitated a strong move away from the dollar and US debt? And, they will wonder why the US deliberately sabotaged a peace deal in March when the probability of a Ukrainian victory is near zero. The Rand report seems to anticipate all these questions as well as the ‘shift in mood’ they will generate. This is why the authors are pushing for negotiations and a swift end to the conflict. This is an excerpt from an article at RT:

The RAND Corporation, a highly influential elite national security think tank funded directly by the Pentagon, has published a landmark report stating that prolonging the proxy war is actively harming the US and its allies and warning Washington that it should avoid “a protracted conflict” in Ukraine…

(The report) starts by stating that the fighting represents “the most significant interstate conflict in decades, and its evolution will have major consequences” for Washington, which includes US “interests” being actively harmed. The report makes it very clear that while Ukrainians have been doing the fighting, and their cities have been “flattened” and “economy decimated,” these “interests” are “not synonymous” with Kiev’s.” (“Rand calls for swift end to war“, RT)

While the report does not explicitly state that ‘US interests (are) being harmed’, it certainly infers that that is the case. Not surprisingly, the report doesn’t mention any of the collateral damage from Washington’s war on Russia, but, surely, that must have been foremost on the minds of the authors. After all, it is not the $100 billion or the provision of lethal weapons that is costing the US so dearly. It is the accelerating emergence of international coalitions and alternate institutions that has put the US empire on the fasttrack to ruin. We assume that the analysts at RAND see the same things that every other sentient being sees, that Washington’s misguided conflagration with Moscow is a ‘bridge-too-far’ and that the blowback is going to be immense and excruciating. Hence, the urgency to end the war quickly. Here’s a excerpt from the report that was posted in bold print halfway through the text:

“Since avoiding a long war is the highest priority after minimizing escalation risks, the United States should take steps that make an end to the conflict over the medium term more likely.”

Interestingly, while the report details the main escalation risks, (The main risks include a broader war with NATO, a spillover of the conflict into other EU countries, and a nuclear war.) it fails to explain why exactly a ‘long war’ would be so damaging to the United States. We believe that this omission is intentional and that the authors do not want to concede that the backfiring of sanctions and the forming of anti-American foreign coalitions is clearly undermining US plans to maintain its grip on global power. Among elites, such talk is verboten. Here’s how Chris Hedges summed it up in an article at Consortium News:

The plan to reshape Europe and the global balance of power by degrading Russia is turning out to resemble the failed plan to reshape the Middle East. It is fueling a global food crisis and devastating Europe with near double-digit inflation. It is exposing the impotency, once again, of the United States, and the bankruptcy of its ruling oligarchs. As a counterweight to the United States, nations such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and Iran are severing themselves from the tyranny of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a move that will trigger economic and social catastrophe in the United States. Washington is giving Ukraine ever more sophisticated weapons systems and billions upon billions in aid in a futile bid to save Ukraine but, more importantly, to save itself. (“Ukraine — The War That Went Wrong”, Chris Hedges, Consortium News)

Hedges sums it up perfectly. Washington’s foolish intervention is clearing the way for the greatest strategic catastrophe in US history. And yet, even now, the vast majority of corporate and banking elites resolutely back the existing policy while shrugging off the obvious signs of failure. Case in point: The World Economic Forum posted a blanket statement of support for Ukraine on its website. Here it is:

The essence of our organization is its belief in respect, dialogue, and collaborative and cooperative efforts. We therefore deeply condemn the aggression by Russia against Ukraine, the attacks and atrocities.

Our full solidarity is with Ukraine’s people and all those who are suffering innocently from this totally unacceptable war. We will do whatever is possible to help and actively support humanitarian and diplomatic efforts.
We only hope that – in the longer-term – reason will prevail and that the space for bridge-building and reconciliation once more emerges.” (Klaus Schwab and Børge Brende, World Economic Forum)

No one should be surprised by this. Naturally, the globalists are going to come-down on the side of their expansionist wrecking-crew (NATO) instead of the world’s biggest proponent of traditional values, borders and national sovereignty. That goes without saying. Even so, the Rand report suggests that support for the war is no longer unanimous among elites. And, since elites ultimately set the policy, there is now an increasing probability that the policy will change. We see this ‘splintering of elite consensus’ as the most positive development in the last 11 months. The only way the United States is going to change its approach in Ukraine is if a growing number of elites come to their senses and pull us back from the brink. We are hopeful that that will happen, but we’re not sure that it will.

The least persuasive section of the entire report falls under the heading of: “US and Allied Commitments to Ukraine’s Security”.

The problem is easy to understand. The authors want to settle on a plan for providing security to Ukraine in order to incentivize negotiations with Russia. Unfortunately, Russia is not going to allow Ukraine to be a part of any western-backed security alliance, in fact, that is why Russia launched its invasion in the first place, to preempt Ukraine’s membership in a hostile military alliance (NATO) linked to the United States. This is a touchy subject that will undoubtedly be an obstacle in any future negotiations. But it is a matter on which there can be no ‘wiggle room’. Ukraine –or whatever is left of Ukraine– will be required to be permanently neutral and all the far-right extremists will have to be removed from the government, the military and the security services. Moscow will not pick Ukraine’s leaders, but it will make sure that those leaders are neither Nazis nor linked to any far-right nationalist organization.

As we said earlier, we think the RAND report indicates that elites are now divided on the issue of Ukraine. We think that is a positive development that could lead to negotiations and an end to the war. However, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that even the most impartial analysis can tilt favorably in the direction of the group that provides the funding. And that could be true here, as well. Keep in mind, the RAND Corporation is a nonpartisan think tank that, according to retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski:

“works for the defense establishment, and were money to dry up there, the thinktank would not exist in it current form. It serves US government interests entirely, and is dependent upon them.” (Lew Rockwell)

What this suggests is that the RAND report may represent the views of the Pentagon and the US Military establishment who believe the United States is racing headlong towards a direct conflagration with Russia. In other words, the report may be the first ideological broadsides against the neocons who run the State Department and the White House. We suspect this split between the War Department and ‘State’ will become more visible in the days ahead. We can only hope that the more judicious faction at the Pentagon prevails.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Ukraine Is Sinking. Are Western Elites Bailing Out? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Let’s start with three interconnected multipolar-driven facts.

First: One of the key take aways from the World Economic Forum annual shindig in Davos, Switzerland is when Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan, on a panel on “Saudi Arabia’s Transformation,” made it clear that Riyadh “will consider trading in currencies other than the US dollar.”

So is the petroyuan finally at hand? Possibly, but Al-Jadaan wisely opted for careful hedging: “We enjoy a very strategic relationship with China and we enjoy that same strategic relationship with other nations including the US and we want to develop that with Europe and other countries.”

Second: The Central Banks of Iran and Russia are studying the adoption of a “stable coin” for foreign trade settlements, replacing the US dollar, the ruble and the rial. The crypto crowd is already up in arms, mulling the pros and cons of a gold-backed central bank digital currency (CBDC) for trade that will be in fact impervious to the weaponized US dollar.

A gold-backed digital currency

The really attractive issue here is that this gold-backed digital currency would be particularly effective in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Astrakhan, in the Caspian Sea.

Astrakhan is the key Russian port participating in the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), with Russia processing cargo travelling across Iran in merchant ships all the way to West Asia, Africa, the Indian Ocean and South Asia.

The success of the INSTC – progressively tied to a gold-backed CBDC – will largely hinge on whether scores of Asian, West Asian and African nations refuse to apply US-dictated sanctions on both Russia and Iran.

As it stands, exports are mostly energy and agricultural products; Iranian companies are the third largest importer of Russian grain. Next will be turbines, polymers, medical equipment, and car parts. Only the Russia-Iran section of the INSTC represents a $25 billion business.

And then there’s the crucial energy angle of INSTC – whose main players are the Russia-Iran-India triad.

India’s purchases of Russian crude have increased year-by-year by a whopping factor of 33. India is the world’s third largest importer of oil; in December, it received 1.2 million barrels from Russia, which for several months now is positioned ahead of Iraq and Saudi Arabia as Delhi’s top supplier.

‘A fairer payment system’

Third: South Africa holds this year’s rotating BRICS presidency. And this year will mark the start of BRICS+ expansion, with candidates ranging from Algeria, Iran and Argentina to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor has just confirmed that the BRICS do want to find a way to bypass the US dollar and thus create “a fairer payment system not skewed toward wealthier countries.”

For years now, Yaroslav Lissovolik, head of the analytical department of Russian Sberbank’s corporate and investment business has been a proponent of closer BRICS integration and the adoption of a BRICS reserve currency.

Lissovolik reminds us that the first proposal “to create a new reserve currency based on a basket of currencies of BRICS countries was formulated by the Valdai Club back in 2018.”

Are you ready for the R5?

The original idea revolved around a currency basket similar to the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) model, composed of the national currencies of BRICS members – and then, further on down the road, other currencies of the expanded BRICS+ circle.

Lissovolik explains that choosing BRICS national currencies made sense because “these were among the most liquid currencies across emerging markets. The name for the new reserve currency — R5 or R5+ — was based on the first letters of the BRICS currencies all of which begin with the letter R (real, ruble, rupee, renminbi, rand).”

So BRICS already have a platform for their in-depth deliberations in 2023. As Lissovolik notes, “in the longer run, the R5 BRICS currency could start to perform the role of settlements/payments as well as the store of value/reserves for the central banks of emerging market economies.”

It is virtually certain that the Chinese yuan will be prominent right from the start, taking advantage of its “already advanced reserve status.”

Potential candidates that could become part of the R5+ currency basket include the Singapore dollar and the UAE’s dirham.

Quite diplomatically, Lissovolik maintains that, “the R5 project can thus become one of the most important contributions of emerging markets to building a more secure international financial system.”

The R5, or R5+ project does intersect with what is being designed at the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), led by the Macro-Economics Minister of the Eurasia Economic Commission, Sergey Glazyev.

A new gold standard

In Golden Ruble 3.0 , his most recent paper, Glazyev makes a direct reference to two by now notorious reports by Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, formerly of the IMF, US Department of Treasury, and New York Federal Reserve: War and Commodity Encumbrance (December 27) and War and Currency Statecraft (December 29).

Pozsar is a staunch supporter of a Bretton Woods III – an idea that has been getting enormous traction among the Fed-skeptical crowd.

What’s quite intriguing is that the American Pozsar now directly quotes Russia’s Glazyev, and vice-versa, implying a fascinating convergence of their ideas.

Let’s start with Glazyev’s emphasis on the importance of gold. He notes the current accumulation of multibillion-dollar cash balances on the accounts of Russian exporters in “soft” currencies in the banks of Russia’s main foreign economic partners: EAEU nations, China, India, Iran, Turkey, and the UAE.

He then proceeds to explain how gold can be a unique tool to fight western sanctions if prices of oil and gas, food and fertilizers, metals and solid minerals are recalculated:

“Fixing the price of oil in gold at the level of 2 barrels per 1g will give a second increase in the price of gold in dollars, calculated Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar. This would be an adequate response to the ‘price ceilings’ introduced by the west – a kind of ‘floor,’ a solid foundation. And India and China can take the place of global commodity traders instead of Glencore or Trafigura.”

So here we see Glazyev and Pozsar converging. Quite a few major players in New York will be amazed.

Glazyev then lays down the road toward Gold Ruble 3.0. The first gold standard was lobbied by the Rothschilds in the 19^th century, which “gave them the opportunity to subordinate continental Europe to the British financial system through gold loans.” Golden Ruble 1.0, writes Glazyev, “provided the process of capitalist accumulation.”

Golden Ruble 2.0, after Bretton Woods, “ensured a rapid economic recovery after the war.” But then the “reformer Khrushchev canceled the peg of the ruble to gold, carrying out monetary reform in 1961 with the actual devaluation of the ruble by 2.5 times, forming conditions for the subsequent transformation of the country [Russia] into a “raw material appendage of the Western financial system.”

What Glazyev proposes now is for Russia to boost gold mining to as much as 3 percent of GDP: the basis for fast growth of the entire commodity sector (30 percent of Russian GDP). With the country becoming a world leader in gold production, it gets “a strong ruble, a strong budget and a strong economy.”

All Global South eggs in one basket

Meanwhile, at the heart of the EAEU discussions, Glazyev seems to be designing a new currency not only based on gold, but partly based on the oil and natural gas reserves of participating countries.

Pozsar seems to consider this potentially inflationary: it could be if it results in some excesses, considering the new currency would be linked to such a large base.

Off the record, New York banking sources admit the US dollar would be “wiped out, since it is a valueless fiat currency, should Sergey Glazyev link the new currency to gold. The reason is that the Bretton Woods system no longer has a gold base and has no intrinsic value, like the FTX crypto currency. Sergey’s plan also linking the currency to oil and natural gas seems to be a winner.”

So in fact Glazyev may be creating the whole currency structure for what Pozsar called, half in jest, the “G7 of the East”: the current 5 BRICS plus the next 2 which will be the first new members of BRICS+.

Both Glazyev and Pozsar know better than anyone that when Bretton Woods was created the US possessed most of Central Bank gold and controlled half the world’s GDP. This was the basis for the US to take over the whole global financial system.

Now vast swathes of the non-western world are paying close attention to Glazyev and the drive towards a new non-US dollar currency, complete with a new gold standard which would in time totally replace the US dollar.

Pozsar completely understood how Glazyev is pursuing a formula featuring a basket of currencies (as Lissovolik suggested). As much as he understood the groundbreaking drive towards the petroyuan. He describes the industrial ramifications thus:

“Since as we have just said Russia, Iran, and Venezuela account for about 40 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, and each of them are currently selling oil to China for renminbi at a steep discount, we find BASF’s decision to permanently downsize its operations at its main plant in Ludwigshafen and instead shift its chemical operations to China was motivated by the fact that China is securing energy at discounts, not markups like Europe.”

The race to replace the dollar

One key takeaway is that energy-intensive major industries are going to be moving to China. Beijing has become a big exporter of Russian liquified natural gas (LNG) to Europe, while India has become a big exporter of Russian oil and refined products such as diesel – also to Europe. Both China and India – BRICS members – buy below market price from fellow BRICS member Russia and resell to Europe with a hefty profit. Sanctions? What sanctions?

Meanwhile, the race to constitute the new currency basket for a new monetary unit is on. This long-distance dialogue between Glazyev and Pozsar will become even more fascinating, as Glazyev will be trying to find a solution to what Pozsar has stated: tapping of natural resources for the creation of the new currency could be inflationary if money supply is increased too quickly.

All that is happening as Ukraine – a huge chasm at a critical junction of the New Silk Road blocking off Europe from Russia/China – slowly but surely disappears into a black void. The Empire may have gobbled up Europe for now, but what really matters geoeconomically, is how the absolute majority of the Global South is deciding to commit to the Russia/China-led block.

Economic dominance of BRICS+ may be no more than 7 years away – whatever toxicities may be concocted by that large, dysfunctional nuclear rogue state on the other side of the Atlantic. But first, let’s get that new currency going.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

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