PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

[gwynedd1]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

I don't see Paul changing much...because he was a middle of the road guy, with excellent performance records. Washington and New York, on the other hand, are simply more blatantly corrupt, and indifferent to the people they are affecting.




Going to the mattresses is really more of ground war reference to fighting within cities. Nukes would be pointless, and relatively useless as well. Chemical weapons would work better, but even the Russians don't really want that messy of a war right now. Putin wants to push Obama around, and make him look ridiculous (which isn't hard, these days), while tricking everyone into thinking he's the only goodguy standing on the question of the Ukraine.

Unfortunately, he mobilized just a tad quickly for the restrained look of a considered approach to the conflict. It would have better for him had he shown some reluctance first, and then be pushed into it by a few eastern Ukrainians. Still, he may pull it off despite all the popping up of resistance, and the sudden coalitions of one set of groups against another.



It should...the neocons are not up to the job. They foment rebellion, and pay off people to do their bidding, but Russia is not a small country on the brink of falling apart, which is what the neocons seem to like messing with, or have any talent at. It would not be so bad if they actually resolved to finish what they start, and then roll out the military in full force, but they know they can't get the funding for a decent response. The Politicians may go with the flow for a while, and then peel off as the way becomes difficult. And so, doing much but aggravating Russia doesn't seem in the cards, which since I don't like military solutions unless there is an attack first, pleases me.

Hi Forrest,

I admire your astute observations.

I doubt two things about Putin. One is that he is not a puppet himself. The other is that if not, then I doubt he is the master chess player. In the parlance of chess he brought his queen out early, and is a target of attack while the West deploys it media and financial resources.

He could have always taken the hammer to Crimea at any time. So why did he play that so badly?

Pawns and knights in the opening Mr Putin......

But Russia, like Germany before it has always been behind the world propaganda curve.


So even from the Russian point of view, I don't trust him.

[gwynedd1]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

And then was not someone wondering about China?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...f-Ukraine.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...f-Ukraine.html

It would be the biggest so called "land grab" agreement, where one country leases or sells land to another, in a trend that has been compared to the 19th century "scramble for Africa", but which could now spread to the vast and fertile plains of eastern Europe.
Under the 50-year plan, China would eventually control three million hectares, an area equivalent to Belgium or Massachusetts, which represents nine per cent of Ukraine's arable land. Initially 100,000 hectares would be leased.

I wonder if this figured into the equation? Is the US using Russia as a scape goat for what is really to prevent Chinese expansion? Maybe it does not want this to go into the Russian sphere but Russia is not a merchantalist rival. Its contained.


Look how cosy China is with Turkey?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A1108L20140202

In fact how could China lose "doing business" in Ukraine? Either they get the bread basket of Europe or they get the West fighting with Russia while it keeps accumulating its advantages.

[Chris Coles]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

And then was not someone wondering about China?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...f-Ukraine.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...f-Ukraine.html

It would be the biggest so called "land grab" agreement, where one country leases or sells land to another, in a trend that has been compared to the 19th century "scramble for Africa", but which could now spread to the vast and fertile plains of eastern Europe.
Under the 50-year plan, China would eventually control three million hectares, an area equivalent to Belgium or Massachusetts, which represents nine per cent of Ukraine's arable land. Initially 100,000 hectares would be leased.

I wonder if this figured into the equation? Is the US using Russia as a scape goat for what is really to prevent Chinese expansion? Maybe it does not want this to go into the Russian sphere but Russia is not a merchantalist rival. Its contained.


Look how cosy China is with Turkey?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A1108L20140202

In fact how could China lose "doing business" in Ukraine? Either they get the bread basket of Europe or they get the West fighting with Russia while it keeps accumulating its advantages.

To my way of thinking this is exactly why I will keep saying that US foreign policy has been utterly stupid for decades. doing a simple business deal carries no harm to anyone and brings in what one needs without an expensive aircraft carrier based offshore.

[don]

the Ukrainian Gold Question

09 MARCH 2014

Ukraine Gold Reserves Said To Be Put On Plane For Safekeeping in the US

Depiction on the Arch of Titus of the gold Menorah being taken from the Temple to Rome after the sack of Jerusalem

This is a story based on a report out of the Ukraine. Obviously I do not know yet if it is accurate. The information coming out of the Ukraine and Crimea should be sifted carefully, no matter what the source.

I find this one hard to believe. I am informed by high reliable people that no one cares about gold anymore. And very important analysts claim that transporting many tonnes of gold (Ukraine is said to have about 33 tonnes) is very difficult, and so unwieldy and fraught with peril that it must be a multiyear project.

But if the Ukraine's gold was taken away for safekeeping, it may be so safe that they will never see it again for a long time. Just ask Germany.

Newswire 24
Ukrainian gold reserves loaded on an unidentified transport aircraft in Kiev
By Marcus Brooks

According to the iskra-news.info last night ,Ukrainian gold reserves (40 sealed boxes) were loaded on an unidentified transport aircraft in Kiev’s Borispol airport. The board took off immediately.

A source in the Ukrainian government confirmed that the transfer of the gold reserves of Ukraine to the United States was ordered by the acting PM Arseny Yatsenyuk.

So my guess is, that is if indeed this report is true it either means the new ruling elite have stolen the gold bullion or perhaps their is a legitimate fear of the Russians taking possession of this bullion, whatever the facts, it still looks very shady indeed.

Conclusion

Official narrative: gold bullion is going to USA (maybe to reassure the Germans their gold is in safe hands, after all the despite numerous requests from the German Govt The Feds have not given access for them to even view their Gold Bullion) . Real narrative: probably to Switzerland where it is divided between Yulia Tymoshenko and her cronies.

Here is a machine translation of the story in Russian from Iskra News:

Tonight from Borispol in the U.S. strartoval plane with gold reserves of Ukraine

As our site workers airport "Borispol", this night in 2-00, with the designated airport runway started unregistered transport plane ...

According to the staff "Boryspil", before it came to the airport four collector car and two cargo minibus Volkswagen, while , all arriving truck license plate missing. Car pulled out of about fifteen people in black uniforms, masks and body armor. Some of them were armed with machine guns. These people have downloaded the plane more than forty heavy boxes ... After that, some mysterious men arrived too entered the plane.

All loading was carried out in a huge hurry. After unloading the car without license plates immediately left the runway, and the plane took off on an emergency basis ... Those who saw all this mysterious "special operation" airport officials immediately notified the administration of "Boryspil", from which received a strong recommendation "not to meddle in other people's affairs ..."

Later, in received call back one of the senior officials of the former Ministry of income and fees, which reported that, according to him, tonight, on the orders of one of the "new leaders" of Ukraine in the United States has been taken all the gold reserves in Ukraine ...

Jesse's Cafe Americain . . .

[GRG55]

Re: the Ukrainian Gold Question

09 MARCH 2014


Ukraine Gold Reserves Said To Be Put On Plane For Safekeeping in the US

I wouldn't imagine Ukraine's gold reserves are the only money being stashed in the USA these days...

[don]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

Kunstler's Chip Shot on the Ukrainian State of Mind . . .

Deep State Descending


And so it’s back to the Kardashians for the US of ADD. As of Sunday The New York Times kicked Ukraine off its front page, a sure sign that the establishment (let’s revive that useful word) is sensitive to the growing ridicule over its claims of national interest in that floundering, bedraggled crypto-nation. The Kardashians sound enough like one of the central Asian ethnic groups battling over the Crimea lo these many centuries — Circassians, Meskhetian Turkmen, Tatars, Karachay-Cherkessians — so the sore-beset American public must be content that they’re getting the news-of-the-world. Perhaps one of those groups was once led by a Great Kanye.

Secretary of State John Kerry has shut his pie-hole, too, for the moment, as it becomes more obvious that Ukraine happens to be Russia’s headache (and neighbor). The playbook of great nations is going obsolete in this new era of great nations having, by necessity, to become smaller broken-up nations. It could easily happen in the USA too as our grandiose Deep State descends further into incompetence, irrelevance, buffoonery, and practical bankruptcy.

Theories abound about what drives this crisis and all the credible stories revolve around the question of natural gas. I go a little further, actually, and say that the specter of declining energy sources worldwide is behind this particular eruption of disorder in one sad corner of the globe and that we’re sure to see more symptoms of that same basic problem in one country after another from here on, moving from the political margins to the centers. The world is out of cheap oil and gas and, at the same time, out of capital to produce the non-cheap oil and gas. So what’s going on is a scramble between desperate producers and populations worried about shivering in the dark. The Ukraine is just a threadbare carpet-runner between them.

Contributing to our own country’s excessive vanity in the arena of nations is the mistaken belief that we have so much shale gas of our own that we barely know what to do with it. This is certainly the view, for instance, of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who complained last week about bureaucratic barriers to the building of new natural gas export terminals, with the idea that we could easily take over the European gas market from Russia. Boehner is out of his mind. Does he not know that the early big American shale gas plays (Barnett in Texas, Haynesville in Louisiana, Fayettville in Arkansas) are already winding down after just ten years of production? That’s on top of the growing austerity in available capital for the so-far-unprofitable shale gas industry. That’s on top of the scarcity of capital for building new liquid natural gas terminals and ditto the fleet of specialized refrigerated tanker ships required to haul the stuff across the ocean. File under “not going to happen.”

Even the idea that we will have enough natural gas for our own needs in the USA beyond the short term ought to be viewed with skepticism. What happens, for instance, when we finally realize that it costs more to frack it out of the ground than people can pay for it? I’ll tell you exactly what will happen: the gas will remain underground bound up in its “tight rock,” possibly forever, and a lot of Americans will freeze to death.

The most amazing part of the current story is that US political leaders are so ignorant of the facts. They apparently look only to the public relations officers in the oil-and-gas industries and no further. Does Barack Obama still believe, as he said in 2011, that we have a hundred years of shale gas?” That was just something that a flack from the Chesapeake Corporation told to some White House aide over a bottle of Lalou Bize-Leroy Domaine d’Auvenay Les Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru. Government officials believe similar fairy tales about shale oil from the Bakken in North Dakota — a way overhyped resource play likely to pass its own peak at the end of this year.

If you travel around the upper Hudson Valley, north of Albany, where I live, you would see towns and landscapes every bit as desolate as a former Soviet republic. In fact, our towns look infinitely worse than the street-views of Ukraine’s population centers. Ours were built of glue and vinyl, with most of the work completed thirty years ago so that it’s all delaminating under a yellow-gray patina of auto emissions. Inside these miserable structures, American citizens with no prospects and no hope huddle around electric space heaters. They have no idea how they’re going to pay the bill for that come April. They already spent the money on tattoos and heroin.

[don]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

Doug Nolan's take on developments . . .

I often refer to global central bank international reserve holdings as a good proxy for the dollar liquidity that has destabilized the global financial “system” over recent years. The incredible growth in foreign holdings of U.S. debt and other financial claims similarly reflects this process that has been ongoing for at least the past two decades.

We’re now fully five years into the “global government finance Bubble.” I have argued that the emerging markets (EM) have been a major recipient of post-mortgage finance Bubble reflationary monetary stimulus. I have posited that EM is this global Bubble’s “subprime.” Moreover, it is my view that the EM Bubble is in the initial phase of deflating.

I stick pretty close to home in my Credit and Bubble analysis. At the same time, it’s fundamental to my money, Credit and Bubble analytical thesis that unchecked monetary inflations and attendant Bubbles have profoundly deleterious effects on financial systems, economies and societies.

I have for some time fretted the geopolitical ramifications of a runaway global financial Bubble and its eventual bursting. From a global perspective, the crazy growth in Fed “money” printing isn’t unrelated to Draghi’s “do whatever it takes” that is not unrelated to “Abenomics” and crazy printing by the Bank of Japan that’s not unrelated to crazy Credit excess in China and throughout EM. All the craziness is symptomatic of deep structural maladjustments in finance and economies on a global basis. And with my view of faltering Bubbles and mounting stress in the emerging markets, I have been on guard for heightened geopolitical instability.

After dropping to $368bn in early 2009, Russian international reserve holdings jumped to almost $500bn by mid-2011. Russian reserves ended 2013 at $470bn, little changed over two years. After expanding at about a 5% pace throughout 2010 and 2011, the Russian economy has since largely stagnated. The Russian ruble has declined 15.8% over the past year, with Russian stocks (RTS Index) down 24% and bond yields up almost 200 bps.

March 7 – Financial Times (Catherine Belton): “An ally of Vladimir Putin has accused the US and a ‘global financial oligarchy’ of organising the violent overthrow of power in Ukraine to ‘destroy’ Russia as a geopolitical opponent. Vladimir Yakunin, a former senior diplomat who now heads Russian Railways, the state railways monopoly, claimed the US had for decades been intent on separating Ukraine from Russia and bringing it into the west’s fold. ‘We are witnessing a huge geopolitical game in which the aim is the destruction of Russia as a geopolitical opponent of the US or of this global financial oligarchy,’ Mr Yakunin said…”

I’ll suggest that the Ukraine crisis potentially marks a critical juncture in global geopolitics. Having been mismanaged and pilfered for years, the Ukraine economy is a basket case and social tinderbox. Meanwhile, the Russian leadership may have calculated that losing the Ukraine to the West at this point would entail unacceptable economic and political costs. The Russians may have decided these costs outweigh the waning benefits associated with the current global financial and economic landscape. Russia and other countries may no longer believe they are benefitting from the forces of global monetary inflation. They may these days see themselves increasingly as losers.

I fear that the unfolding Ukrainian crisis and rising tensions between China and Japan are no mere coincidence. I have no reason to believe that Russian and Chinese officials are coordinating their geopolitical thinking, maneuvers or strategies. I do, however, sense that the changing global financial and economic backdrop is altering incentives, disincentives and the calculus of cooperation, coordination and confrontation.

The world is indeed changing, but certainly not in the manner those seduced by inflating securities prices behold. Sure, central bank liquidity is still expanding and the global debt mountain just keeps rising to the stars, increasingly unhinged from real economic wealth. Yet the global economic pie has begun to decay. I fully expect mounting domestic economic and global political pressures to increasingly dictate a much more aggressive stance with respect to “geopolitics.”

I’ll further add that I don’t believe the ongoing melt-up in U.S. stocks and the rapidly deteriorating geopolitical backdrop are coincidental. Again, from my analytical framework, both are creatures of historic monetary inflation. Serious (faltering Bubble) stress at the “periphery” now dictates erratic behavior many would view (from the old world view) as irrational. Meanwhile, liquidity flooding into the “core” feeds a historic speculative Bubble. The Russians might very well see it in their relative best interest to dig uncompromisingly in for the long hall, believing the West actually has more to lose. The backdrop would seem to ensure we’re entering a period of extraordinary uncertainty, although over-liquefied securities markets remain priced for extraordinarily low risk.

[gwynedd1]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question





http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2014/02/21/ukraines-crisis-not-ours-n1798218/page/full

First, though portrayed as a tyrannical thug, Viktor Yanukovych won the presidency of Ukraine in 2010 in what international observers called a free and fair election. He may not be Marcus Aurelius, but his remains the legitimate government.
Second, high among the reasons Yanukovych chose Russia's offer to join its custom union over the EU is that Putin put a better deal on the table.

Moscow put up $15 billion in loans and cut-rate oil and gas. The EU offered some piddling loans and credits, plus a demand for reforms in the Ukrainian economy monitored by the IMF, but no commitment to full membership in the EU.
As for the "protesters" who came to Maidan Square in November, not all came simply to protest. Many set up tents and shacks, threw up barricades, seized government buildings, burned the headquarters of the ruling party, battled police and demanded the overthrow of the regime.
How many Western countries would permit a planned putsch in their capital city?

[vt]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

Poland asks for more U.S. troops.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/...urity-22858973

[don]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

Paul Craig Roberts' Interview

[BadJuju]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

Why do people listen to this quack? There are much better people that warrant your attention than this deranged old man.

[Chris Coles]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

For the record, I am going to thank Don for placing this interview up here on iTulip. It is one thing to read a persons thoughts on a piece of paper or a computer screen; it is quite another to see him, hear him; be able to judge for oneself what he stands for.

My view is he is absolutely correct in what he is telling us; that the US is at war with the rest of the planet. That is a view I have come to believe is true; before I watched that interview.

Thank you Don.

[Forrest]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

Wasn't the Roman Empire always engaged in holding onto, and attempting to extend their power over others?

Alas that America is no different...and except for geography, will face similar ends.

[gwynedd1]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

Poland asks for more U.S. troops.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/...urity-22858973

We would like to see greater U.S. armed forces involvement on our territory within NATO," Komorowski said.


Excellent. One step closer to the annexation of Poland. Putin and Obama seem to have concocted quite a scam.


Or maybe it was the Military Industrial Complex.

[gwynedd1]

Re: PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

For the record, I am going to thank Don for placing this interview up here on iTulip. It is one thing to read a persons thoughts on a piece of paper or a computer screen; it is quite another to see him, hear him; be able to judge for oneself what he stands for.

My view is he is absolutely correct in what he is telling us; that the US is at war with the rest of the planet. That is a view I have come to believe is true; before I watched that interview.

Thank you Don.

I am one more rung up the ladder of intrigue. I believe that finance is at war with the rest of the world, and the US is just the muscle.