Remember all those economic sanctions that the USA demanded be imposed on Russia for its perfidy in the Ukraine for opposing Washington's installed puppet government in Kiev and for not allowing its Black Sea Fleet base at Sevastopol to fall into NATO's hands? At the time, I predicted that this was a short-sighted policy on Washington's part at best, since Europe's economic future lies in the expanded trade with the East, and with the integration into the Eurasian infrastructure projects that Russia and China have been championing. In particular, I pointed out that Europe's "locomotive," Germany, might politely mouth its obedience and perform the obligatory genuflexions to Washington, but the reality was - and is - that the economic and geopolitical future of the country, and therefore of Europe, lie eastward, not across the Atlantic ocean. What remained to be seen was whether Germany would lead in practice, while performing the perfunctory obeisance to Washington.This article, shared by Mr. V.T., says it all:
Germany to Invest 2Bln Euro in Russian Railways
The article concludes where our "high octane speculation" begins, by highlighting the ineffectiveness of economic sanctions in bringing Russia to accede to Westen demands in the Ukraine:
A recent poll conducted by the German-Russian Chamber of Commerce (ANK) has found that 80 percent of companies that have trade links with Russia believe that economic sanctions are not having their desired effect.
The proposed rail route, to which Germany wants to pledge some two billion euros in financing, would be a southern route railway from Moscow to Kazan and eventually on to Beijing, supplementing the Trans-Siberian route, which travels north of Mongolia and Manchuria. The strategic and economic value of such a route are self-evident, as is the geopolitcal consequence, for the route would clearly allow Russo-Chinese (and if participating, German) economic influence and dominance in the crucial Central Asian region that was so critical to former US National Security Advisor Zbgnw Brzznsk's (I'd like to purchase a vowel, please) "Grand Chessboard." Such a high speed rail system - Moscow to Beijing in two days, counting stops along the way - would allow massive amounts of freight to move between Asia and Europe overland, and to do so quickly. Andx for traditional "land powers" such as China and Russia (and for that matter, Germany), such a route offers obvious temptations and alternatives to sea trade and commerce, where each must contend with American sea dominance.
Of course, all this also means that rail lines are be interdicted from the air, and from...space. It is thus highly intriguing that Russia and China have recently concluded extensive cooperative deals on space matters. As I've detaield earlier this week, these deals, from the military and security point of view, are essential if these planned infrastructure developments are to be secured. The space platform secures the land-based on, and as I suggested earlier this week, vice versa: the land based infrastructure build-out over the next decades that is being planned by Russia and China also appear to be of a scale sufficient to support and sustain a large space-based economy.
The real question now, for Germany, is whether or not Russia and China will welcome German participation in the project, or not. And if so, then one may expect - in my high octane speculation of the day - that this will be blocked by Washington somehow, perhaps by ratcheting up tensions in the Ukraine once again, as this article suggests:
If one reads this in the context of the willingness to invest two billion euros in the Moscow-Beiking railroad project, then it is clear that some in Germany's corporate and finance world are looking askance at the whole sanctions policy.
And that means that sooner or later, either Frau Merkel's government, or its successor, is going to have to make that inevitable choice: orient eastward, or continue to be a lap poodle for Washington.It means also, like it or not, that Germany will have to take a more active role in any security measures in Central Asia, and perhaps a hint of this has already been served with the German decision to support President Hollande's intervention in Syria. But howsoever one parses that support role, the continued draw of eastern trade on Germany, and its foreign policy, will be a story to watch in 2016...
See you on the flip side...
Robert you are correct it’s either destruction of creation, I think Germany will choose creation
My (hypothetical) view of Putin is that he is highly distrustful of Western banking ways. I am curious about his ‘reading list’. Has he read John Perkins’ “Confession of an Economic Hitman” or Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”? Etc. He MUST know whom he is dealing with…
Given that, what is the best way to fight back?
On a lower-consciousness level, I might think of Micro$oft’s alleged playbook: “Embrace, Extend, Exterminate.” If Putin cannot Fight and cannot Flight, this could be his best option. Pretend to embrace the capitalist camp’s ways, extend these ways into actually caring about others, and eventually exterminate the old ways (because nobody wants them). I could see all of his win-win ‘deals’ with other nations as coming from the 3E’s.
On a higher-consciousness level, I could see Putin as embracing some version of Camelot with his people. The mighty protecting the downtrodden, rather than exploiting them. What a concept.
Hmmm. The ancient origin of the name ‘Arthur’ came from the Bear…
hmm head of the kgb? yep he might have some experience with the topics and humans klein and perkins wrote about. probably more first hand than theirs.
the white knight protecting the downtrodden is a nice meme though.
weirder and weirder that brasscheck sent me this last night from adam curtis.
who is this guy and who financed him?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggr8zTJsvZA
If Germany and Russia grow too close I would also expect the Anglo-American powers to use the Muslim populations in Europe start trouble (especially in Germany). The refugee flow has 2 functions: 1) To be forced integrated into Europe to break down national/social cohesion and destroy European peoplehood. 2) To be used as insurgents if the Europeans (especially the Germans) become disobedient and break away from their Anglo-American masters.
I also expect the Anglo-American power to stoke Polish Nationalism (and Baltic Nationalism) and probably try to build up the Polish military.
@Bear Claw
No the refugee invasion is to bread out the indigenous white race and destroy Christianity (and therefore their culture). It’s only happening in white countries. Look up the stats on white population decline since 1900. In Australia it’s the Chinese, it is estimated that by 2090 the population of Australia will be 67% Asian (and that’s a conservative figure). Let’s see how white people will be treated once they are the minority in their own countries.
You forget Spaghetti Arts neither the Americas or Australia are European property to begin with. As for Europe since the disaster of the Crusades that allow the Turks into Southern Europe Europe has been on borrowed time anyway with have taken care of ourselves at anytime throw out history inter tribal war been are thing always.
@marcos toledo: Thanks for the history lesson Marcos. I don’t believe you are getting my point. Everyone here seems to make a big deal whenever America or Chine flexes their muscles. Who cares, all China has to do is wait 50 years and Australia will no longer be an Anglo-American satellite. With 70% of the population Asian by then who do you think they’ll side with. Same thing is happening in Canada. Wake up West you are being invaded covertly.
who needs a war when the west can be overthrown by breeding? the quiet decline of the white races, hardly mentioned, but in play. If the fabric of a country is the people in it what happens when the majority of the people are of a different race and faith?
@RAJM. My thoughts exactly. Who needs open warfare, and with the decline of the white races comes the fall of the Christian Western Culture with it. And you couldn’t be more correct “hardly mentioned”, because every white person has to be politically correct.
Immigration was used by the corporate state to pit one group against another[divide and conquer], using the more desperate newcomers to undermine efforts in making labor gains and to serve as strike breakers. Now they are using them to kindle religious wars.
The Powers to be want to bring back feudalism…
and a crusades mentality[using sex, and any other emotional tools to leverage the divide].
again Robert, it’s ONLY one way traffic into white countries.
When WHITES go into other countries it’s usually to exploit resources, including labor.
Of course, the color is a meme loco attached to exploit the language into a divide of black/white/yellow and the like.
What they don’t want to draw attention to is the color of private money power[issuing 97% of a nation’s currency. The public purse is in coins ONLY.
meme/logo
Yes it would seem to be a karmic kickback white people for imperialism….but of course genocide of the West comes with the destruction of classical civilization in the west….from Venice to the destruction of England subsumed under the City of London, the headquarters of world imperialism.
The rape of Europe has happened before, the Moorish slavers of course, as the slave trade continues. Of course the Jews were a big part of the Slave Trade to the New World….as they are orchestrating this invasion of Europe.
It is all rather disgusting, the rape of Europe, the fundamentalist evil of the Abrahamic religious madness….
Anyways there is the law to give in this time of insanity!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Law is center to the ruling class authority – its starting point, an idol-like worship to entrance the intellect; it is neither law nor critical law – but hanged men and women, whose views and actions challenged those laws and their privileged ownership class.
How prescient Robert it’s already happen and the local white jerks are falling for it. Some sexual harassers just happen to mention they’re refugees from Syria how convenient for our puppet masters.
It’s funny that they think they will be able to control the Muslims in Europe. I have a feeling they have no intention of even trying. I suspect something much more fowl is afoot. Possibly the whole purpose of everything they do is to set the stage for the end game to play out. By end game I mean the end of everything as we now know it. Too many people and no place for us in the Elites future paradise on New Zealand and the Maldovas.
the general idea is coming clearer. crisis reaction solution? a little hegel anyone? they don’t need to solve the refugee crisis. just like they didn’t need to provide for hurricane katrina victims. we may need their help, but they do not need to give it.
now the question comes: how can we make it more profitable for the profiteers to profit from butter than from guns?
“How can we make it more profitable for the profiteers to profit from butter than from guns?”
Excellent phraseology! And true, from a non-sociopathic point of view. Stir in a sociopathic (perhaps non-human) nature, and I’m not sure how the mix will gell…
it’s not as crazy an idea as the friedmanesque meme of “never waste a catastrophe” aka order out of chaos. at some point, chaos gets a bit unprofitable. at some point one has to let nature (and all us common folk) get along in life and with life.
seriously any idiot (including evelyn r and his progeny) can pretend to creativity destructively. sooner or later idiocracy is self evident and a self limiting disease. even covered over and lied to routinely, the most idiofied among us figure out that aspartame, roundup, agent orange,…. are all clear evidence of war against us, direct and not so covert.
ok. i’m ranting now. can anyone tell i watched ‘the world according to monsanto’ again today?
appreciate the patience. still the question stands. even idiot satan worshippers eventually see how they’re screwing themselves primarily even as they’re so intent on screwing all others.
I suspect the children of the super wealthy get more and more disconnected from reality with each new generation. They are spoiled, arrogant and don’t realize even the best laid plans never work out the way you expect. Academic theories and solutions are wrong and misleading as often as they are right. The life extended elderly among their numbers likely aren’t working on all cylinders either and don’t care about anything other than their addiction to the euphoria they get messing over the future of the masses and hurting them. Putin is right, the elite are self destructing and they are too ignorant and arrogant to realize it. They have come to feel they are indestructible and unstoppable and couldn’t be further from the truth.
Remember, your dealing with a Hydra; a combination of P/P, Power/Profit – hence, GMOs are part of the butter equation, along with weaponizing food[financialization of food].
They have the Midas touch of death in whatever they touch. This is the very nature of wetiko disease of exploitation[Columbus and Other Cannibals by Jack D. Forbes]/the Cancer Stage of Capitalism[John McMurtry].
Meanwhile back in Cologne the invasion of Germany begins… silence
If I was a German citizen I would be praying that they build this railway as soon as possible and then announce an “ISIS-free homeland welcoming” in the backwaters of western Mongolia.
Free train tickets for everyone, ALLLL ABOARRRD!
********************************************
I know what you’re thinking; what is this guy talking about?
I’m talking about the lunacy of a million brand new people (and growing) in a land half the size of Texas that already has 80M citizens! And with completely divergent cultures!
How on Earth are they going to function normally at all in the next few years let alone be a major trans-Eurasian-not-quite-eastern-but-also-not-quite-western-stuck-between-the-west-and-the-east player?
It irks me to my core that somebody, anybody, with a grasp on history would make Germany of all places, accept a situation akin to the pre-WWII conditions that Hitler utilized in his rise to power!
And yet, that’s exactly what a psychopathic NWO globalist cabal would do!
Therefore I’d like to know exactly whose money it really is supposedly going into this new $2B EURO investment?!
This is ringing similar (to me anyways) of the sound of London joining the AIIB bank just to keep tabs on the enemy.
Pretty soon Germany won’t be a world player anymore if they keep accepting radical Islamic immigrants. They will either be a civil war torn wasteland or so radical both China and Russia will come to see them as a threat.
Roger this has been the plan for centuries. Imagine the mess in the Americas if Christianity had been impose in the northern continent and Islam in the southern continent with the connecting central the battle ground. As it is we got Catholic-Protestant divide and rule that preform the same thing.
And then of course there is that minority who are pushing the divide and conquer for millenium…..
that’s pretty much the idea. refugees have been used as a weapon of war routinely forever. anyone take a look at sweden lately. red ice radio henrik palmgren has been vocal and detailed about it for at least a year. from all indicators sweden is the first and worst hit with the weaponized refugee crisis. if you want to see how it’s done and the its implications, take a look.
meanwhile, all those ghost cities in china would make great refugee centers right? wonder if fema’s got any camps planned. those would have to work out better than toxic trailer parks in new orleans, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZdBeczDLpA
The world now looks at the US with very different eyes, and the more the US talks war, the more the people distrust them. Trust is a very big thing in mutual agreements on building things like railroads, and the bond between Russia and China will grow, and now it seems slowly that the EU is talking the same talk. If Germany is looking to the east for it’s investments then most likely some “other” EU countries will follow, as Joseph implies, watch this space.
Please let it be a space elevator…! For the love of Clarke.
Hello Mr Farrell, I wrote an article, inspired by some of your views:
https://vlkovobloguje.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/polemika-s-konspiraci/
The situation with the sanctions can be seen differently, when you listen to what Mr Putin said on the press conference:
http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/193333/Vladimir_Putin_Press_Conference_Kremlin_Russia__1812_2014/
(about 6:00 min)
It’s an opportunity to rebuild russian economy when the oil price is falling, and at the same time, some goods from EU and around the world are sanctioned, and have to be replaced by russian economy.
Their economy needs rebuilding, because it’s based on income from bussines with oil and natural gas highly. And if you’re right and the era of new sources of energy is coming…it would ruin their economy !
Russian cooperation on ITER:
http://atominfo.cz/2015/10/rusko-dodalo-supravodice-pro-toroidni-magnety-tokamaku-iter/
Rosatom, which is under control of russian gov., is in.
can anyone translate?
Germany can read the explicit tea leaves and will side with the creative forces over the destructive policies and culture of the West. Germany’ recent history, despite the Hollywood propaganda, was trying to free itself from the West’s chains of debt peonage. They fought fire with fire.
Now they can fight with the plough for a transformative positive motion, away from wars and the wetiko psychosis of destruction.
The AIIB will invest in real infrastructure; not zombie banks. This Silk Road will deepen and strengthen the ties within Eurasia via mankind’s innate hard-wired cooperative nature[not survival of the fittest; but survival of those who fit as a vital thread to the web of life]; all these nations becoming a vital part of the gateway bridge toward creating a better way of life for all.
The West’s view point is that it’s not nice to make a fool of those who policies benefit only a privileged few at the expense of ALL society.
War and destruction versus creation and community.
What would you choose?
[If you, of course, had something even resembling self-governance.]
On a little off topic side, it looks like in last couple weeks the General who commanded the Russian Airborne troops that occupied Crimea had died due to some “heart problems”, then another, even higher rank General, the chief of GRU himself (the famous Russian Military Intelligence Agency) died suddenly too.
And Rogozin, the vice prime minister that deals with military programs or so, had a “shooting accident” in which supposedly he accidentally “shot himself” in the foot.
Now these can be some coincidence or not, but they look kinda suspicious. Couple months ago it was one of Putin’s closest collaborators, a Russian oligarch that was found dead in US this time.
“Putin goes mole whacking… Again”
Or
“The empire strikes back?”
Definitely cleaning house over there no doubt with some help from the Chinese I.T. Department.
it was the head of rt mikhail lesin, right?
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/putin-associate-founder-rt-dies-washington-dc-hotel-room/
Yes, that’s the guy I was talking about. Its hard to say what’s about and is kinda hard to think all these are simple coincidences.
Some rumors on the internet said that some of Putin’s close circle probably try to leave the boat for some reasons (and move their assets in west/USA), or there is some internal power struggle at Kremlin, or that some there get greedy and sell some military secrets (like the plans of the newest ICBM and SLBM) to some foreign powers (possibly to China).
The problems with Russia space programs and various failed launches might have something to do with this as well.
Could be a good sign or a bad sign. Such a rail system would be highly valuable for moving troops and supplies. Could be a sign that Russia and China are about to abandon the West’s austerity drive back to mid-evil feudalism and are preparing for an economy and return to progress of development with or without the increasingly backward leaning wests participation. Such a project would deffinately give a badly needed jump to their economy and employment as well. Perhaps this is a sign that Germany is just playing along with this austerity and New World order bull just long enough for the fools in London to dismantle all their industrial capabilities or perhaps like Switzerland they are going to try to remain neutral in the possible coming WWIII. If the economy begins to reverse the rail will be for economical benefits; if austerity increases in the East along with West then the rail will be for war.
Looks like our Northman overlords wish to plunge Eurasia into continental chaos. For their sick idea of fun and profit making money the old fashion way stealing and murdering. As for Germany it’s part of Eurasia and wants to profit from this economic union and to it’s eyes a bright future.
Major scale cooperation continues, there are also European-Russian space programmes. The losers are as usual the smaller players, such as Italian food and wine producers who can’t sell to Russia because the Rome government has to get its “brownie points” as a Washington/Brussels vassal; at least for those who don’t bother to see the multi-layered game at foot.