Recent developments touch on Latin American sovereignty, the narrative pivot on calling Ukraine a proxy war and U.S. investment in the reckless nuclear standoff.
Depiction of Brazil’s Lula da Silva. (hafteh7, Pixabay)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
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Multipolarista’s Ben Norton reports that former Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who is still favored to beat President Jair Bolsonaro in the nation’s election later this year, has announced plans to create a Latin American currency called the “Sur” (South) in order to “be freed of the dollar.”
Lula is also making headlines for his position that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin are equally to blame for the war in Ukraine, and that the U.S. and EU also share blame for the conflict.
This comes at the same time the Mexican government begins promoting the idea of a Latin American lithium alliance. Bolivia’s Kawsachun News reports that Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has expressed his intention to form an alliance with major lithium nations Bolivia, Argentina and Chile for the benefit of all nations involved. This could have major implications for the future due to the use of lithium batteries in smartphones, laptops and tablets, as well as electric cars.
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Latin America finally moving out of Washington’s Monroe Doctrine sphere of domination and into its own collective sovereignty for its own benefit would be an earth-shaking historical development. That there appears to be some movement toward that end is both exciting and scary, because the U.S. empire isn’t known for peacefully allowing its vassals to simply move out from under its thumb. Either way, though, the fact that nations around the world are coming out against the empire with increasing boldness is hugely significant.
Brazil’s left-wing leader Lula da Silva says if he wins the 2022 presidential elections, “we are going to create a currency in Latin America,” called the Sur ("South"), to combat “the dependency on the dollar” https://t.co/bYVifxRL74
— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 4, 2022
The New York Times is reporting that U.S. intelligence has helped Ukrainian forces “target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war,” citing anonymous senior U.S. officials.
This incendiary claim may or may not be true as U.S. officials have already admitted that they’ve been pouring out a deluge of disinformation about this war with the loyal facilitation of the Western press. If it is true, it would mean yet another dangerous escalation in the U.S. proxy war against Russia.
Oh, and on that note, it would appear that we are indeed allowed to refer to this as a proxy war now.
The New Yorker has come right out and declared that the U.S. is in “a full proxy war with Russia,” a claim that before this narrative pivot caused social-media users to call me a Kremlin stooge and more obscene varieties of that same slur. It’s hilarious that it was ever controversial to say that pouring billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry into a foreign nation to be used by C.I.A.-trained fighters with the direct ongoing assistance of U.S. military intelligence is a proxy war.
Speaking of the U.S. empire’s world-threatening proxy war with Russia, I would like to highlight an important new dialogue between The Socialist Program’s Brian Becker and a scientist named Greg Mello, who is the co-founder and executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group and an expert on nuclear war. The interview is just as valuable for Becker’s insightful commentary as Mello’s. Together they provide a lot of sorely needed insight into the nature of the horrifying games the empire is playing with our lives in this nuclear standoff.
Lastly we should flag the fact that Spanish police just arrested a Ukrainian politician and media figure named Anatoly Shariy on behalf of the Ukrainian government on charges of treason. This “treason” appears to amount to political speech that has been outlawed by the Ukrainian government, with earlier reports on Kiev’s accusations against him only referencing “propaganda in favor of Russia” and “subversive activity against Ukraine.”
Shariy fled Ukraine for EU asylum in 2012 for fear of political persecution by Kiev, and has been living in Spain since 2019. The opposition party that Shariy founded in 2019 was banned by the Ukrainian government following the Russian invasion. Reuters reports that he has been released by a Spanish court on condition of surrendering his passport and performing regular court check-ins pending an extradition hearing.
This is the Free World that we are risking nuclear annihilation in order to protect, folks. Are we sure we want to do this? Is this fight really worth risking the life of every terrestrial organism for? It’s a question we should all be contemplating very seriously.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Her work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following her on Steemit, throwing some money into her tip jar onPatreon or Paypal, purchasing some of her sweet merchandise, buying her books Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone andWoke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com and re-published with permission.
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As a 42 years old Brazilian, who has not voted for the last 20 years in defiance of obligatory voting, I have to clarify that whatever Lula says is just politics as usual. The last time I actually voted was for Lula when he was first elected president. I told myself and friends that I would vote for the Workers Party because I supported them during my youth, but I knew then that their government was going to be just as everybody else. It was. They never solved the major problems of Brazilian society: poor public education and wealth concentration.
Unfortunately Lula is still considered by foreigners as a great statesman, someone on the left. But he is not. He just picked his vice president candidate, Alkmin, who’s is a strong defender of neo-liberal policies as the Democrats in the US. They are all “centrists” now.
Please don’t be taken by Lulas rhetoric. He is a professional politician, simple as that. He will probably be elected because just as in the US election Biden-Trump, he will be running against despicable Bolsonaro.
The SUR could easily slip into the new global reserve basket that Russia, China, India and others are working on. I would hope that Mexico is brave enough to help make the SUR happen.
The end of the PetroDollar is near, what will the new dollar look like?
Part 2. Should have added this. Hard to imagine the greatest nuke genius (incl. being Einstein’s boss) being driven out of public life, but…not so unlike today’s dumbed down blip in history.
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm5fCxXnK7Y
THIS was Part 1.
Your usual Fabulousness, Ms. J! The Becker/Mello video is well worth watching, as today’s younger set may have been pre-k during the gory scientific details they largely discuss. btw most of my lay interpretation of their referenced accidental-nuke-war research ‘to date’ is on google books. I could scan the whole essay for anyone who (courteously) asks.
hxxps://books.google.com/books?
id=R2OSBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=cybernetics+culpability+and+risk+automatic+launch+and+accidental+nuclear+war&source=bl&ots=UomAmTG-w4&sig=ACfU3U3VP9gMmQmTwOVMjCkXnpaKX10K5A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwja9dCZns73AhXJSDABHYKsCWQQ6AF6BAg1EAM#v=onepage&q=cybernetics%20culpability%20and%20risk%20automatic%20launch%20and%20accidental%20nuclear%20war&f=false
It always makes me feel better every time I read one of our Caity’s “right on” editorials! I’m sure millions of other people must feel the same way. It would be very difficult to quantify just how much influence her nearly DAILY articles are having on moving the Overton Window in America away from endless wars. increasing militarism and rampant jingoism. But I suspect her impact may well be quite considerable, right up there with a Jimmy Dore or Chris Hedges etc..
Clearly Caity’s sparkling polemics are not only a delight to read, they also establish her show her to be one of the most outspoken voices of dissent against a thoroughly rotten and rank, but still deeply entrenched, establishment [dis]order, which now, as she has well documented, is well on the way to using rife prosecutorial abuse to punish all dissent in order to assert ever more tyrannical, indeed dictatorial, violations of our most sacred civil liberties, — and this merely to protect its own massive power over a people now deemed incapable of rational judgement on their own and hence excluded entirely, — as study after study has corroborated — from ANY role, however perfunctory, in the determination of the social policies that will soon impact them directly and significantly. I suspect we will soon see far more outrageous bans on websites and persons who, at least in the warped brains of the new inquisitors, allegedly threaten — although we never receive any explanation of WHY exactly these people are being targeted — to disrupt the general political complacency of the brain-washed, somnolent, and anesthetized masses necessary to the maintenance of the despotic rule of the highest ranks of the regnant oligarchy.
Anyway, keep pushing back against the legion lies and criminal actions of the imperialistic and warmongering US regime, Caity! You are doing very good work and deserve all the minor kudos that are for the most part all we, your appreciative readers around the globe, are capable of giving back to you to as a small tribute to express our heartfelt gratitude for all you are doing to wake this nation from its perennial “sleep of reason.”
“The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” — Henry Thoreau, “Walden”
In a chilling debate with Mearsheimer on PBS, an influential figure, Evelyn Farkas, gave an unhinged demented rant about Moldova or something as the imperative for war with Russia and casually dismissing the increasing risk of global omnicide. Who are these freaks that they allow to set our media’s narrative? Mearsheimer won the debate, with an excellent slam dunk point – that Biden is doing the opposite of what JFK did to try to reduce the risk/danger of Armageddon. When we most need a JFK, all we got is Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Evelyn Farkas to save the world. I’m sure we’re all gonna sleep better knowing that.
I confess that I don’t know much about him (other than that he was a US president, that he was a sex addict, and that it was not he, but the USSR that called the bluff in the Cuban missile crisis — the US withdrew missiles from Turkey in exchange for the USSR agreeing to pull back from missiles in Cuba), but do you really think that JFK would have been doing differently than Biden and company?
Will endless war and propaganda keep the average American from noticing that he/she is about to become houmeless?
To be smeared as “Russian Troll Bot” or “Kremlin Stooge” is a mark of horor, these days.
Careful Lula. Gadaffi tried starting an African currency….
“This is the Free World that we are risking nuclear annihilation in order to protect, folks. Are we sure we want to do this? Is this fight really worth risking the life of every terrestrial organism for?”
If THIS is the kind of world Americans wanted, we just should have let Hitler win WWII.
What a disgusting travesty that so much money, lives, weaponry and Washington lies have been invested in the Nazi regime from Kiev.
Just look at Zelensky’s record, every move he’s made can be characterised as the sort of heinous amoral and antidemocratic stunt that we usually condemn when any other country (except our precious “allies”) pulls it off.
For him, we break the bank spending money we don’t have and desperately need to keep our own economy afloat, and we abandon every moral principle we ever flapped our lips about over the past 80 years.
Hitler must be doing a jig in his grave, at the same time asking, “Why’d you guys pick on me?” “You seem to love the act, but not the actor.” “Nationalsozialismus über alles!”
Thank you for this update. Looking forward to learning more about this lithium alliance which I haven t heard about yet. Raytheon and Lockheed sure don’t seem to mind pushing up against the line of weapon sales vs. Nuclear annihilation. I do appreciate the U.s. govt. Pushback on the no fly zone that it seems a majority of my country is apparently clamoring for so there’s that.