Russian state media is citing the governor of Russia’s Belgorod Region, Viacheslav Gladkov, to report that there’s been another cross-border raid into Russian territory from Ukraine, which marks the third such incursion within two weeks.

The governor of the border region oblast which has also for months been subject to sporadic shelling from Ukrainian forces said that Russia’s military and the FSB security services are engaging the “saboteurs” and that fighting is ongoing, though few details have been given. 

Russia’s RT is describing, “In a video address, Gladkov responded to Denis Nikitin, the leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, a neo-Nazi group of Russian nationals fighting on Kiev’s side.”

“In his video, the governor stated that a battle with the corps detachment was currently raging in Belgorod Region, and that he hoped that all members of the group would be killed,” the report says.

Belgorod’s Gladkov was quoted as saying–

“I saw the appeal of scoundrels, bastards, murderers and fascists who allegedly want to meet with me, offering a conversation in exchange for prisoners. In fact, a group of saboteurs went in, there is a battle in Novaya Tavolzhanka. I hope that they will all be destroyed, it cannot be otherwise. Every day civilians die at the hands of these fascists, we bury them every day. Crippled children and dead old people – that’s their handiwork,” he said.

Earlier in the weekend he said that seven civilians have died over the past week due to shelling from Ukraine.

⚡️Heavy fighting taking place between FSB and RDK unit of the AFU in Novaya Tavolzhanka pic.twitter.com/15JNXZT9gi

— War Monitor (@WarMonitors) June 4, 2023

The New York Times wrote on Saturday that “Shebekino, a town of 40,000 six miles from the border, has effectively become a new part of the front line as Ukraine has intensified attacks inside Russia, including on residential areas near its own borders.”

This is all upending the lives of residents in the border region, akin to what already happened long ago on the Ukrainian side of the border. “The spate of assaults, most recently by militia groups aligned against Moscow, has sparked the largest military evacuation effort in Russia in decades,” the report underscored. The past days have witnessed area residents move into temporary shelters, including the large Belgorod arena in the oblast capital.

The Ukrainian-backed Russian Freedom Legion has just posted this video of what it says are its troops advancing in the outskirts of the Russian city of Shebekino. ⁦@GeoConfirmed⁩ pic.twitter.com/0agH6BiG2f

— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) June 4, 2023

Currently it appears the militia groups which have crossed the Russian border on Sunday are holding ground and seeking to advance, at least temporarily. During the first major assault of two weeks ago Russia sent in major military assets such as helicopters to put down the incursion. Wagner Group has since offered to send its fighters to protect the border.

Chief Foreign-Affairs Correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov, has written in an update posted to Twitter that “Ukrainian-backed Russian fighters remain in the Russian town of Novaya Tavolzhanka and have taken POWs. The psychological impact of that is hard to overestimate.

Trofimov wrote further “The governor has offered to meet them to take back the POWs, Prigozhin has also offered to send an aide.”

developing…

Authored by Bill Pan and Joshua Philipp via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The boycott against corporations that tried to push left-wing sex and gender ideology on their customers opens the opportunities to expose what’s behind their embrace of “woke” agenda, according to author and commentator James Lindsay.

Speaking on EpochTV’s “Crossroads,” Lindsay said the boycotts “must definitely have an impact,” as Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch scrambled to downplay its now-notorious partnership with transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney.

“This boycott damaged them enough to where they scrambled, they made some kind of a crazy statement. The statement just didn’t satisfy anybody. So the boycott stays on, the pressure stays on,” he told host Joshua Philipp.

Woke Corp’s Priorities

On May 9, a month after the initial Mulvaney backlash, Anheuser-Busch lost its perfect Corporate Equality Index (CEI) score, which is overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT advocacy group.

The CEI measures how well a company’s policies adhere to a set of criteria concerning “LGBTQ equality” in the workplace. Businesses with the highest possible 100 CEI points are given the title “Best Place To Work For LGBTQ Equality.” More than 800 American businesses met all the criteria to earn a percent rating and the designation last year, according to the Campaign’s latest report.

In response to the loss of a perfect CEI score—and in spite of the customer backlash, Anheuser-Busch pledged last week to donate $200,000 to support “LGBTQ+ business owners of color.”

The fact that a company would rather further upset customers than get a lower social credit rating, Lindsay said, shows “how this extortion racket works and how serious the extortion racket is.”

“We see which thing they’re choosing to do,” Lindsay explained. “Whether it’s Corporate Equality Index score, whether it’s a broader ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] score, they’re choosing to serve the same agenda.”

“This reveals a lot of things that are very useful,” he continued. “We can have hearings. We could have the House Oversight Committee talking about this: ‘Why are you doing this? How important is that number? Why is it number so important? How did this number come to mean so much to your company? Who made the deals? What are the costs?’”

“These kinds of things need to be dragged out into the public under oath, and in a high place.”

Fighting Woke Corps in Court

“We now have very good reason to believe that shareholders have excellent lawsuits in potentia for the violations of fiduciary responsibility,” Lindsay told Philipp.

In fact, conservative legal group America First Legal is preparing to sue Anheuser-Busch, as well as several other big-name brands, for allegedly tanking their shareholder value through their Pride Month promotions that triggered outrage and boycotts.

On Tuesday, America First Legal called on anyone whose shares in LGBT product-promoting companies lost value to reach out to them to join a class action lawsuit they are working to file against those companies.

“ATTENTION: Are you a shareholder of [Target], [Kohls], [Anheuser-Busch], or other companies that are promoting transgender, LGBTQ and PRIDE products and diminishing shareholder value?” the organization wrote on Twitter with a link to its email address. “We want to hear from you.”

Target has been the subject of a conservative-led boycott over merchandise celebrating Pride Month, including a onesie for infants that states “Bien Proud;” a children’s book with the title, “Twas the Night Before Pride;” a book that tells children how to use transgender pronouns; and a handful of T-shirts with similar slogans. The company also drew backlash for “tuck-friendly” swimwear. A Target spokesperson has since said the swimwear wasn’t made for children.

Read more here…

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

The AI rally is boosting semiconductor stocks, which are traditionally a highly cyclical leading indicator of economic growth. A soft landing (or just a very mild recession) is still unlikely, but less so than it was a few months ago.

The share performance of highly-cyclical semiconductor firms has always given a good advance read on economic activity. Today, semis are pointing to an upturn in one of the most leading data points of sentiment, ISM new orders.

Similarly, semis are also pointing to a global cyclical upturn. South Korean exports are themselves a highly cyclical barometer of global activity and semis’ rise suggest they should soon do likewise.

One must be careful when using single inputs like this. It’s well known the rally in semis is being driven by AI speculation, and it is also fairly well understood that stocks like Nvidia now look overvalued.

Furthermore, it’s folly not to weigh up the rally in semis with the weight of other evidence that the US will soon enter a recession, if it’s not already in one (as I have discussed frequently).

Nonetheless, it’d be remiss to ignore altogether a hitherto reliable leading signal of economic growth, that may be telling us something we’re missing.

It’s common for one sector (eg housing, oil, etc) to lead us into a recession, and it’s not unusual for a sector to lead us out of one too.

The US Navy is reporting a second dangerous interaction and provocation by China’s military in less than a week, days after an American spy plane was approached very closely by a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea.

The Pentagon says that on Saturday the American destroyer USS Chung-Hoon and the Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal were conducting passage of the Taiwan Strait in international waters when a Chinese warship approached and maneuvered in “an unsafe maritime interaction”.

The Chinese vessel crossed the US destroyer’s bow at a distance of 150 yards, which forced the US Navy ship into evasive maneuvers for the sake of avoiding a collision.

“During the transit, PLA(N) LUYANG III DDG 132 (PRC LY 132) executed maneuvers in an unsafe manner in the vicinity of Chung-Hoon,” the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s statement said. “The PRC LY 132 overtook Chung-Hoon on their port side and crossed their bow at 150 yards. Chung-Hoon maintained course and slowed to 10 kts to avoid a collision,” it described. 

A second pass then came directly in front of the USS Chung-Hoon at a distance of 2,000 yards, with the Chinese warship then shadowing off the destroyer’s port bow.

“The LY 132’s closest point of approach was 150 yards and its actions violated the maritime ‘Rules of the Road’ of safe passage in international waters,” the US Navy statement underscored. 

Parts of the incident were captured on video by Canadian journalists aboard the HMCS Montreal. The Canadian ship had been trailing the Chung-Hoon at some distance. 

Interestingly, both sides are using the incident to accuse the other of “bullying” – with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin having said Saturday, “We will support our allies and partners as they defend themselves against coercion and bullying.” The Pentagon chief emphasized, “To be clear, we do not seek conflict or confrontation, but we will not flinch in the face of bullying or coercion.”

China’s military defended its warship’s actions, which comes after repeat warnings against the US cross ‘red lines’ regarding military support for self-ruled Taiwan:

China’s defense minister defended sailing a warship across the path of an American destroyer and Canadian frigate transiting the Taiwan Strait, telling a gathering of some of the world’s top defense officials in Singapore on Sunday that such so-called “freedom of navigation” patrols are a provocation to China.

In his first international public address since becoming defense minister in March, Gen. Li Shangfu told the Shangri-La Dialogue that China doesn’t have any problems with “innocent passage” but that “we must prevent attempts that try to use those freedom of navigation (patrols), that innocent passage, to exercise hegemony of navigation.”

The Chinese top military chief further urged the restoration of dialogue between the two rivals, stressing that a clash between the nuclear-armed powers US and China would be an “unbearable disaster for the world”.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“I’m sick and tired of hearing Democrats whining about Joe Biden’s age. The man knows how to govern. Just shut up and vote to save Democracy.”

– Rob Reiner, Hollywood savant

Perhaps you’re aware that the World Health Organization (WHO) is cooking up a plan to impose its will over all the sovereign nations on this planet in the event of future pandemics.

That means, for instance, that the WHO would issue orders to the USA about lockdowns, vaccines, and vaccine passports and we US citizens supposedly would be compelled to follow them.

Why the “Joe Biden” regime would go along with this globalist fuckery is one of the abiding mysteries of our time – except that they go along with everything else that the cabal of Geneva cooks up, such as attacks on farmers, and on oil production, and on relations between men and women, and on personal privacy, and on economic liberty throughout Western Civ, as if they’re working overtime to kill it off. And all of us with it.

I think they are working overtime at that because the sore-beset citizens of Western Civ are onto their game, and getting restless about it. So, the Geneva cabal is in a race against time before the center pole of their circus tent collapses and the nations of the world are compelled to follow the zeitgeist in the direction of de-centralizing, foiling all their grand plans.

The “Joe Biden” regime is pretending to ignore the reality that this WHO deal is actually a treaty that would require ratification by a two-thirds vote in the senate, an unlikely outcome. In any case, handing over authority to the WHO — in effect, to its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — to push around American citizens like a giant herd of cattle would be patently unlawful.

That center pole of the circus tent is the wobbling global economy. It’s barely holding up the canvas over the three rings of the circus. In the center ring, the death-defying spectacle of the Biden Family crime case is playing out before a huge audience (us). This week, a gun went off at the FBI and smoke is curling out of the barrel. FBI Director Christopher Wray was forced to verify that he’s been sitting on an incriminating document for three years from a “trusted” confidential human source, i.e., an informant, stating that the Biden Family received a $5-million bribe from a foreign entity when “JB” was vice-president.

That’s only one bribe of many others, of course, as documented in the Hunter Biden laptop, and it must be obvious it represents treasonous behavior that will demand resignation or impeachment. As this spools out in the weeks and months ahead, do you think Americans will be in the mood to accept further insults such as “Joe Biden” surrendering our national sovereignty to the WHO?

Anyway, you must ask yourself: why on earth should I trust the WHO about anything? Did they not participate in laying a trip on the world with Covid-19? How did those lockdowns work out? Do you think they destroyed enough businesses and ruined enough households? How’s the vaccination program doing? Effective? Safe? Yeah, maybe not so much. Maybe killing a lot of people, wrecking immune systems, sterilizing reproductive organs, causing gross disabilities, shattering lives.

Of course, in over three years neither the WHO nor the US medical authorities showed the slightest interest in helping to figure out how the Covid-19 virus was made in a lab, and exactly how it got loose in the world. Lately, Dr. Ghebreyesus has warned the world about much worse future pandemics supposedly coming down at us. Oh? Really? What does he know that we don’t? That possibly new efforts to concoct chimeric diseases are ongoing in labs around the world? (You know that dozens of such labs were discovered in Ukraine as the war got underway there in 2022.) What’s Dr. Ghebreyesus doing to stop that?

If US orgs and citizens are involved in this “research,” why doesn’t the WHO alert our government leaders so they can stop it? (Would they? I’m not so sure.) And, who is behind it this time? The Eco-Health Alliance again, like with Covid-19? By the way, that outfit got another whopping grant last fall from the NIH to “study” bat viruses — right after the NIH terminated a previous grant on account of The Eco-Health Alliance failing to turn over notebooks and other records.

No, you cannot trust the WHO about anything. The “trust horizon” (a concept introduced by the great Nicole Foss, late of The Automatic Earth dot com) is shrinking. You can no longer trust any distant authorities. You also cannot trust the US federal government (especially the executive branch behind “Joe Biden”). And notice: the trust horizon is shrinking just as the world is de-centralizing. This, you see, is the main contradiction behind all the Globalists’ twisted ambitions to control everything, including you. They are working against the current tide of human history which is pushing everything toward down-scaling, re-localization, and re-assertion of the sovereign individual person.

That trend will become increasingly evident as things organized at the giant scale start to implode — giant retail chains, medical behemoths, hedge funds, big banks, you name it. The world no longer has the mojo for globalism. There’s reason to wonder these days whether the USA has the mojo to remain a unified national polity of states. Our federal government is not only financially bankrupt beyond any coherent reckoning, it is also morally bankrupt, and it has decided to make war against its own people. None of this is satisfactory and none of this is working. It’s time to figure out who and what you can trust and act accordingly.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) warned in a Tuesday advisory that Minnesota residents who use marijuana cannot legally own firearms despite the recent legalization of cannabis for recreational use.

According to the St. Paul ATF office, because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, people who smoke weed or take marijuana edibles are “still federally defined as an ‘unlawful user’ of a controlled substance,” and are therefore “prohibited from shipping, transporting, receiving, or possessing firearms or ammunition.“

“Until marijuana is legalized federally, firearms owners and possessors should be mindful that it remains federally illegal to mix marijuana with firearms and ammunition,” said ATF acting special agent in charge of the of the St. Paul field division, Jeff Reed.

That warning from the ATF is concerning for Second Amendment rights advocate Rob Doar, vice president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus. He said he’s long been aware of the state-and-federal cannabis contradiction, whether it’s for medical or recreational use.

Doar urges gun owners to be aware of the risks, even though under Minnesota’s new law, sheriffs cannot deny someone a permit to carry solely because they are enrolled in the medical cannabis program or are an adult using marijuana. -CBS News

“I think if [the ATF agents] weren’t planning on enforcing it, they may have just let it go and it would kind of be a wink-wink, nudge-nudge that yes it’s illegal, but much like other federal cannabis prohibitions, we’re not going to be enforcing it,” said Doar, adding “The fact that they sent out the notice is cause for some raised eyebrows.”

Cannabis attorney Jason Tarasek of Vincente LLP says that the federal government has typically turned a blind eye and has “left states alone” when it comes to those which have legalized marijuana, but now “It’s an interesting song and dance we’re going through with the federal government.”

Doar and Tarasek would like clarification from the feds.

“It would be great to get some clearer guidance from the federal government that would make people in legal markets more comfortable that they don’t need to be worried about the federal government knocking at their door,” said Tarasek.

During the Obama years, the DOJ issued guidance advising that they wouldn’t interfere in states that had legalized marijuana as long as it didn’t interfere with federal law enforcement priorities. It was rescinded by former US Attorney General Jeff Sessions during the Trump administration.

Read the ATF letter below:

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

The group of 40 migrants are threatening to sleep rough outside the hotel until the U.K. Home Office agrees to its demands…

Better Wi-Fi, more financial assistance, and private rooms were just some of the demands made by migrants who demonstrated outside the doors of their new hotel accommodation in an upscale residential area of central London on Thursday.

The group of adult men, many of whom arrived in Britain illegally in small boats via the English Channel with a view to claiming asylum, used their suitcases to barricade the front doors to the Pimlico Comfort Inn and staged a pavement protest against what they consider to be offensive living standards afforded to them by the British government.

The group was recently transferred from a hotel in Ilford, Essex, but told reporters that their new accommodation was not to their taste and refused to return to their rooms until they are each provided with private accommodation.

“They said we’re going to move you to another, better place. They gave us this postcode. When we checked on Google Maps, we said, oh this is very nice. But when you get in, it’s like a jail. And they treat you very, very bad. They treat you like an animal,” a 21-year-old Iranian national who arrived in Britain via small boat told The Telegraph newspaper.

Some complained that they had previously been assigned two people to a room, but were now expected to share an en-suite room with three others. The group also bemoaned the smell from the toilet and poor internet access.

“We are not kids, everybody had a private room. We need a private room. How do you live with four men?” asked a 26-year-old African male.

A local resident who lives close to the hotel told Remix: “I live very close to this hotel (3 or 4 mins away) in London, and the scene yesterday really was bizarre. Lots of migrants sitting on the street outside the hotel said they would not go back in, as the taxpayer-funded accommodation was substandard.

“When I asked one of them, they went into a long rant about the bathrooms being dirty. Frankly, it does look like a terrible hotel, but tourists used to pay £100 plus to stay there.”

Richard Tice, the leader of the Reform Party founded by Nigel Farage, filmed an exchange with an Iraqi national named Dia, one of the migrants objecting to the living conditions.

“These people come from another hotel and this hotel is not good,” Dia told the politician.

He explained that the migrants had come from a hotel with big, nice rooms where he had been living for two years, but considered their new accommodation to be “very small” and the Wi-Fi “too weak.”

Asylum seeker complains: size of room, bathroom too small & bad wifi in his Central London hotel & not enough weekly money. Been here 2 years

I apologise on behalf of British taxpayers for the poor wifi… pic.twitter.com/s25DBwsO0i

— Richard Tice 🇬🇧 (@TiceRichard) June 2, 2023

He added that he “can do nothing” with the government allowance of £8 per week, as London is “too expensive,” although he noted that his hotel accommodation and food — which he said is reasonable — are paid for on top of this.

Tice wryly apologized on behalf of the British taxpayer for the poor accommodation and offered to go and talk to the manager on the migrants’ behalf.

Commenting on the stunt, backbench Conservative MP Lee Anderson tweeted:

“The bare-faced cheek. If you don’t like our tax payer funded rooms then there is your old tent waiting back in France. You know where France is? It’s that safe country you left where they will accept an asylum claim.”

The Home Office has sought to alleviate the financial burden on the U.K. taxpayer to accommodate the large influx of migrants seeking asylum in Britain in recent months, with the current bill estimated to be approximately £6 million (€7 million) per day.

Efforts have been made to relocate existing migrants to more cost-effective accommodation, for example by doubling room capacity. The governing Conservative party has also announced plans to house new arrivals on floating barges and in disused military bases in rural locations, despite widespread public criticism from local residents concerned about the social ramifications arising from such a proposal.

“We are trying to drive down the costs and number of hotels by various mechanisms,” a government source told The Telegraph. “You see on TikTok, you get the people smugglers saying you will get your own hotel place.

“We are trying to cut down on the costs. If they say they don’t want to go to the accommodation that they are offered, we can withdraw support.”

Commenting on the pavement protest, a Home Office spokesman insisted the accommodation offered to the migrants in question is “of a decent standard and meets all legal and contractual requirements.”

Oil prices were trading up on Friday afternoon as shorts got a little nervous heading into the OPEC+ weekend, with new rumors circulating about the group’s discussions about another 1 million bpd in production cuts.

The OPEC+ group is scheduled for three separate meetings beginning this weekend and concluding on June 4.

While the general sentiment has been that the group will keep the status quo as far as production targets are concerned. But Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister has made boisterous threats against oil’s speculators in the runup to the meeting, saying that shorts will be “ouching”.

On Thursday, Reuters suggested that the OPEC+ group would be unlikely to deepen its production targets at the meeting this weekend.

But late on Friday, Reuters suggested that OPEC+ was indeed discussing an additional output cut of around 1 million barrels “among possible options” for the meeting on June 4.

“Everything is on the table,” Iran’s OPEC Governor Amir Zamaninia told reporters in the Austrian capital.

Crude oil prices were already trading up ahead of the meeting, but increased even more in the afternoon hours, bringing Brent crude to $76.32 at 4:20 p.m., a $2.06 per barrel increase on the day. WTI was trading at $71.90 per barrel at that time.

A supply reduction of as much as 1 million barrels a day is the most likely outcome, according to RBC’s Chief Commodities Strategist Helima Croft.

“We think that the continued macro worries and soured sentiment will lead the group to make another downward adjustment,” she said in a note.

But Saudi Arabia appears to still be in control of OPEC+, and The Kingdom could decide to make good on his threats to punish short sellers for their speculative trades that fly in the face of market fundamentals.

“I keep advising them (referencing oil speculators) that they will be ouching, they did ouch in April, I don’t have to show my cards. I am not a poker player…but I would just tell them watch out,” Saudi’s energy minister said late last month in the runup to the meeting.

As a reminder for why there could be some “ouching”. Bloomberg shows, the trading positions of hedge funds and other non-commercial traders are at the most bearish levels since at least 2011 across a combination of all major oil contracts…

Finally, while hedge funds are betting that OPEC is quietly overproducing and exporting much more than their recent quota permits, a recent update by Goldman Sachs shows that bears may be in for a very rude awakening, as seaborne net exports by OPEC countries which announced a cut in April have finally tumbled by over 1mmb/d over the past 2 weeks.

OPEC+ has suggested with its latest moves that its sweet price spot is around $80-90 per barrel, so it is trying to keep prices around that level.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

President Erdogan’s re-election in Turkey is a monumental failure of Western pressure. Because of it, it’s time to take our eyes off Ukraine and look at a different theater of World War III with equal if not bigger implications.

Turkey is another in a now long string of failed Economic Hitman operations cum Color Revolutions. The last big one to fail was in Belarus in 2020 following the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko.

Turkey has been the subject of a seven-year campaign to be rid of Erdogan, beginning with the 2016 coup attempt organized out of the NATO airbase at Incerlik. Turkey’s been through a persistent five-year brutal devaluation of its currency, the lira, seeing it drop from less than 2 versus the US dollar to nearly 21 this week in the wake of Erdogan’s victory.

I’ve covered this story in detail (see my Turkey archives here) being one of the lone voices out there trying to parse Erdogan’s monetary policy actions which I’ve argued sought to de-dollarize Turkey’s foreign exchange liabilities and forge an independent path.

Erdogan, wily as a fox, has been deftly playing the US and Russia/China off each other for years, positioning Turkey simultaneously as a member of NATO, the gatekeeper to the Black Sea, and the financial and trade crossroads linking East and West.

The West’s campaign to overthrow President Assad in Syria beginning in 2011 couldn’t have gone forward without Erdogan’s help. He went along with it very willingly having been promised Turkey claiming Idlib province in the West and taking most of the north. Vladimir Putin accepting Assad’s invitation for assistance in fighting ISIS and Erdogan’s pets in Idlib (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS) began the unraveling of those plans.

Turkey shooting down a Russian SU-31 in November 2015 was supposed to push Putin to war against Turkey, giving NATO every reason to engage the Russians directly. But Putin and Erdogan came to an understanding over this incident, implying that it wasn’t on Erdogan’s orders the Russian plane was shot down, but rather the usual suspects at Foggy Bottom, Langley, GCHQ in London who did.

If you wonder why I’m never worried by the latest lame attempt to draw Russia into a wider conflict in Ukraine by events like the Nordstream or Kerch Strait bridge bombings it was Putin’s handling of this moment with Erdogan and then later the shooting down of the Russian IL-20 ELINT plane over Syria by someone who definitely wasn’t Syria, who took the blame to avert WWIII.

These were moments where Russia and NATO were being pressed into conflict and Putin refused to follow the ready-made Tom Clancy script prepared for him by the spooks who never seem to run out of at-bats no matter how many times they strike out.

It is against this background that we have to analyze the complete failure that is the West’s campaign to unseat Erdogan and his AKP party from power in Turkey.

The ZIRP years in the West coincided with the big degradation of Turkey’s finances as Erdogan invited Western investment into the country to support his territorial ambitions. But, Erdogan, as pointed out by Baris Doster of Marmara University noted:

“The government at the head of Turkiye is extremely pragmatic, which is expressed in the ability to make a sharp turn in foreign policy,” Doster told Sputnik.

“There are many examples of this: these are relations with Israel, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. When relations with the East are not going well, Turkiye turns to the West, and in case of difficulties with the West, it turns to the East. However, in the current situation, I believe that the existing political vector will remain intact.”

I agree. In effect, Erdogan’s pragmatism led him to nearly every move he’s made over the past decade, going along with NATO when they were on the offensive, but quickly pivoting and cutting bait on a policy the minute they were put on the defensive, c.f. my above comments about Syria.

In fact, it’s easy to argue that Erdogan’s breaking point with the West over Syria is what has dominated geopolitical headlines for the past seven years. He relishes the role as the guy with the leverage over all NATO policy in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, whose access he controls thanks to the 1936 Treaty of Montreaux.

He’s still holding Sweden’s entry hostage, something I get the feeling the new government in Stockholm prefers.

With his re-election and Turkey’s finances improving Turkey’s importance will only grow. He will not leave NATO willingly, instead using his veto power to slow the roll of the neocons, Eurocrats, and globalists who have betrayed not only him but Turkey. For all of his aspirations, Erdogan is a Turkish nationalist through and through.

He will now throw more sand in the gearworks of NATO’s plans for wider conflict in the region from Ukraine to Iran and Armenia until the West kicks Turkey out or someone assassinates him.

All the while he will continue to invite Russian, Iranian and Chinese money into Turkey with the goal of lowering its dependence on foreign energy trades settled in the dollar.

The Turkish people have given him another five years to complete this transition away from the West to an independent trade hub. If the West is smart they will not antagonize him further.

I was asked by Sputnik News for my thoughts earlier this week on these issues directly. You can find my comments in these two articles (here and here). As always, I am publishing the full Q&A below the break in the interests of transparency and to ensure that the context of my comments haven’t been lost.

In the run-up to election day on 28 May, the Turkish lira came under unprecedented pressure from major financial giants. For example, analysts of Western banks JPMorgan Chase and HSBC Holdings began to spread information about the inevitable weakening of the lira to levels of 24-25 lire per dollar. We also saw many other Western financial investors short selling the Turkish lira.

Here are the questions we were thinking about:

Why do you think that Western financial giants have taken these moves against the lira in recent days? Could this be an effort to influence the Turkish election?

Yes, absolutely. The US has made no bones about their unhappiness with the way President Erdogan has conducted foreign policy in recent years. I’ve felt and published previously that the lira has been under consistent foreign actor attack since the summer of 2018, when this issue first reared its ugly head.

Back then only the admission that Italian and French banks had loaded up on dollar-denominated Turkish corporate debt, putting their balance sheets at risk ended that round of pressure. Erdogan, for his part, saw the situation for what it was and took control over the central bank to wrest control of monetary policy from the IMF.

There was little option and the lira was destined for this hyper-devaluation versus the dollar. Turkey’s net foreign exchange liability position, which in 2018 was over $240 billion, was its Achilles heel.

Today that number is down to ~$80 billion, according to recent Bank of Turkey data. So, while the situation is improving, it is still the vector on which Erdogan is most vulnerable. To fix this Erdogan has rightly invited Chinese and Russian capital into Turkey and cut major energy deals with Putin to mitigate their chronic current account and trade deficits as a major energy importer.

So, yes, financial and monetary instability, crushing hyperinflation of the lira, and questionable geopolitical interventions have undermined Erdogan’s popular support putting him in today’s runoff election.

The recent notes from US banks are simply pushing the situation to the extreme. Turkey has few options but to continue to de-dollarize.

Who do you think the Biden admin and Western financial giants prefer in this election? Why?

Clearly not Erdogan. They have put considerable support behind his opponent Kemal Kilicdaroglu, cobbling together a Not-Erdogan “Table of Six” coalition which is the only thing they agree on. It is reminiscent of last year’s Not-Orban coalition in Hungary.

The results there were far more embarrassing for the EU/US neoliberals because Orban wasn’t dealing with the chronic currency issues plaguing Erdogan. That said, Erdogan’s victory wasn’t really in doubt after the general election which he nearly won outright.

Biden and Europe want a Turkey loyal to NATO and their program to maximally confront the Russia/China/Iran axis. Erdogan has been a thorn in that program since late 2015 and Russia’s intervention in Syria laid bare both his and NATO’s complicity in balkanizing it.

He has played both sides against each other to forge an independent path for Turkey. Many of his moves have been questionable but viewed through that lens the pattern of his behavior is quite clear. His attempts to forge a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia last year was likely the last straw for the West.

Turkey is the lynchpin to the Eastern Mediterranean and continued US presence in the Middle East. Despite the economic troubles of Turkey, he was able to communicate them as continued US anti-Arab behavior. From here, with him in power for another four years (and likely the last four), he has a big task in front of him to stabilize Turkey’s finances. He’s already made the case successfully that NATO turned its back on Turkey, now he’s going to have to turn that into a definitive policy.

Erdogan’s unorthodox monetary policy has been the topic of extensive discussion among Western economists. What is your assessment of it?

I’ve written about this in detail in the past here. Erdogan’s ‘unconventional’ monetary policy was the basis for his exit strategy from the West for Turkey. Erdogan challenged conventional IMF policy of raising interest rates to attract foreign investors.

Why would you want to attract the same people who previously pulled their money out of your country, destabilizing it. Foreign capital inflow under this model is just blackmail, leaving the government dependent on foreign largesse.

If they don’t like your policies, they pull their money out, crash the currency and hope to effect political reform more to their liking. What Erdogan did at the end of 2021 when the lira hit a peak of 18.2 versus the dollar was to use Turkey’s relatively clean balance sheet (less than 40% debt-to-GDP) to encourage Turks to save and invest in lira (which I went into detail in the article linked above) while encouraging Russian and Chinese investment in Turkish sovereign debt and infrastructure/trade projects.

Those have been excellent investments for those investors. In November 2021, Turkish 10-year debt was yielding more than 23%. Today that number is 9.2%. The lira depreciated from an average of 15 to today’s 20 versus the dollar. Even accounting for the exchange rate losses, these have been excellent returns. Remember bond prices rise as yield falls.

Now, with his re-election, Erdogan and Turkey are on the other side of political risk of new leadership changing the course. Turkey isn’t out of the woods yet, but the economic data is improving, in some areas like Manufacturing Confidence (108) and Capacity Utilization (75.4%) quite rapidly.

Political stability is what is needed now. Militaristic adventurism isn’t. Erdogan has been given another four years to complete the turnaround and reimagining of the Turkish economy.

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Authored by Todd Hayen via Off-Guardoan.org,

It has always been astounding to me that people think for even a second that their government makes decisions to help the people—that has never been the case.

If a government’s decision helps anyone it is always an after effect…or an afterthought or a collateral unintended benefit.

The primary intent is for power, control, and money…to satisfy individual pursuits and goals of the global narcissistic/god-complex elite.

Anyone (which turns out to be most everyone) who supports this and thinks their government, or their nation, is operating in the people’s interest is signing their own death warrant.

“Don’t be so negative, Dr. Todd, there are good things in life too!”

Oh my yes, there are: newborn babies, sunsets, oceans, art, music, forests, waterfalls, sex with your lover, dogs…millions of things. But that is not what I am writing about right now. I am writing about the thing, and group of things, that will wipe all of that good stuff off the face of the earth. Sure, sure, sure, it won’t be forever. Good will prevail, but it could be a million years before it all comes back if we let it go now. And I think it is worth the fight to preserve what we’ve got.

Needless to say, people have always followed leaders. I am not an anthropologist, but I would take a guess that even in primitive times there were leaders of tribes, chiefs, kings, queens, or whatever. I would also guess that this arrangement probably worked well more often than not. Societies were close knit; if a leader went bonkers it was probably easier to just push him or her off a cliff somewhere. And considering how different things were back then, there probably was not as much incentive to be selfish, power hungry, wampum hungry, or weird in other ways. I also would guess this complacent sort of culture, if there ever was such a thing, did not last very long.

I’m sure adjacent tribes had some things the neighbors wanted, and sure the all too human trait of wanting power over others did not take too long to appear. Being the Grand Poobah of many people had to have the same allure it has today. Wars broke out, discrimination certainly reared its ugly head (“that tribe over there has longer necks than we do, let’s kill them!”), and of course truly important issues caused conflicts, like need for food, water, etc.

Things were a lot worse back in history than today in a lot of ways. But things along these lines did actually get better, in my humble opinion, during a brief period in the West. The establishment of a new country with fresh ideals was a sight for sore eyes back in the late 1700’s. I don’t think anything like it, on that particular scale, had been attempted in the human experience post antiquity (which we, regardless of what we have been told, know very little about). It indeed was a grand experiment—the new colonies in North America shedding the shackles of the tyranny of King George III of England.

The new fledgling country created a Constitution that was truly inspiring at the time. The checks and balances incorporated in that government was also inspiring, and did hold itself together fairly well for quite some time. Of course there are always problems, as there would be with anything brave and novel. But it all hung together fairly well for a bit of time.

I’ll stop there with the history lesson, which may not be all that accurate anyway, but I think you get the picture. Even if you disagree that the new United States of America was an exciting bit of work, you probably can agree that putting one man, or woman, in charge of a lot of people, has never gone all that well. Before the presidency of the United States, there were of course Kings and Queens. Even the US was concerned about having a single person at the head of the executive branch of government, lest it be too much like a monarchy. Some continue (many actually) to believe that the US form of government is still the best, and if certain things are readjusted, the US will continue to be the greatest country in the world.

I digress.

Wherever you are on that fence, you must agree that things are rather different now than what the founding fathers envisioned. Why? That would take a book, or several, to address. Point here is that we can no longer trust this system to be objective, compassionate, fair, benevolent, and not self-serving and destructive. In fact, it seems that the system itself is selling out to foreign interests, and the actual sovereignty of the nation is threatened, and this threat is largely coming from within.

We see this with other nations as well, basically handing over their sovereign rights as a nation to the likes of the WHO, or the UN, or even the WEF. What we see is much like watching a Sci-Fi motion picture where the bad guys are stripping a nation of everything that makes it the “representation of the people” into a personal self-serving slave to unelected powers.

What does this mean? Well, when you really think about it, there is no way this sort of global take over could ever be in the best interests of other human beings living on the planet. Even if you could have a benevolent world power (which is an oxymoron, in my opinion) you would, just by its nature, have to rule in very broad strokes, i.e., everything you implemented would have to be implemented for the good of the majority. That leaves quite a few people out. The hundreds of diverse cultures and the billions of humans that make them up would have to be reduced down to manageable attributes—becoming more and more like each other.

What does this sound like? If you thought “prison” you win the prize. Look at cultures like North Korea, and you will get some idea of what would be happening. And it is worse than that, because North Korea did not start out as a diverse culture—unlike the diversity of the entire globe.

And all that assuming this world system is benevolent, which it most certainly is not. Of course they present themselves as benevolent, and much like all fictional evil leaders (as well as the real ones throughout history), they may even believe they are benevolent. But any world leader(s) will have to focus on the destruction of humanity before they can accomplish any sort of world control over its inhabitants. That is simply the nature of the beast. I’ll say it again: any world leader(s) will have to focus on the destruction of humanity before they can accomplish any sort of world control over its inhabitants. No two ways about it.

And of course, in our modern age, this destruction of humanity is quite a bit more complex than literally whipping people into compliance like they did in the old days. Right now (and this will probably change) most of the psyop is accomplished either through the carrot enticement and then ruling with the stick, or through fear (stick first, carrot as a reward for compliance.)

It is the same game.