The City of London’s Sanctions Policy by Brian Lantz

Targeting the American People!

A screenshot of a Google search from 12th March 2022

We all see the escalating prices at the gas station, and most know the increasing prices of heating oil and natural gas to heat homes. That is not new to anyone. It was happening in big leaps well before the present Russia/Ukraine war. Joe Biden and his Green City-of-London controllers created those leaps by launching an assault on fossil fuels worldwide and sending out the news that credit would not be issued for future production.

But now, you hear it again, as before: “Russia, Russia, Russia!” It was used in a soft coup against Donald Trump’s presidency as he fought to make this country sovereign again. Now, it is being used to get you to accept yet another manufactured emergency, and to blame it on Putin. But did you know that with the latest round of the Biden collective’s sanctions against Russia, predatory commodity futures have skyrocketed—hyperinflated—around the world, putting even your family’s food supply and your pay check at direct risk? Did you know that the prices now put on raw materials needed for human survival have almost nothing to do with physical value, but with pure speculation on spot markets controlled by the globalist modern British Empire?

In one day this week, Tuesday, March 8th, the price of nickel on the London Metals Exchange more than doubled, and the global market froze. The London Bullion Market Association Gold Price “fix” has surpassed $2,000 per troy ounce. Did you know that some of Russia’s biggest now-sanctioned mining and heavy industry companies are controlled by shares voted in London, and in London’s “spiderweb” of offshore banks? Did you know that US wheat has risen to over $12 a bushel—an increase of 50%?

Price shocks are hitting everywhere—nickel needed for stainless steel and lithium-ion battery cells; futures in corn and soybeans; palladium & neon for semiconductors; aluminium and titanium for aerospace. Russia is a major producer for all of these and there are not ready substitutes. All of this has begun rippling through the physical economy and will rapidly raise the price of virtually every product. The shocks will soon be where you work and where you live.

The Biden collective’s insane sanctions policy against Russia, Russian leaders, Russian commodities, and Russian trading partners, is not hitting Russia—they figured out long ago how to survive a maximum sanctions regime. Rather, the sanctions are targeting the American people. The sanctions are further triggering a chain reaction crisis across the debt-sodden, globalized ,and  “financialize,” world economy. Having sought and provoked an insane wartime confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, the modern-day British Empire of monetarism is now an existential threat to both the national and economic security of the United States – and the world.

“Eating Comes First!”

Take the price of fertilizers to our farmers. These prices already had exploded in 2021. But as of March 2, 2022, according to the US Department of Agriculture, three kinds of fertilizer had “dramatically increased” further in price: the cost of urea is 149 percent higher, liquid nitrogen is 192 percent more expensive, and anhydrous ammonia is up 235 percent. Russia is the world's largest exporter of urea and second largest exporter of potash, another key fertilizer ingredient.

The big reason for speculative rises in fertilizer prices is the surging futures price of coal and natural gas—fuelled by actual physical shortages. (It is natural gas, or gas derived from coal to produce ammonia, which is used to synthesize urea.) With the Biden collective cutting off the 8% of US oil that has been coming from Russia, and natural gas futures prices in Europe five or six times that in the US, these prices were going up, and fertilizer plants have been shutting down due to rising costs. Many fertilizer retailers to farmers won’t even give prices and commitments to their farm customers, since they can’t get product secured. In Arkansas, the price of urea reportedly went from $400 per ton to as much as $1,000 per ton already in February. Where possible, farmers are now substituting poultry litter for fertilizer, but the problem is that the supply of poultry litter is far, far short of farm demand!

As a consequence, food prices at the grocery store, rising rapidly, will now rise even faster, and that is along with growing physical shortages. Russia and Ukraine supply 30% of global wheat exports, and with sanctions and the effective closing of Black Sea ports, the wheat futures price, as of March 08, 2022, is $12.8650 per bushel, compared to a 2021 average of $8.3786. Russia and Ukraine also supply more than half the world's sunflower oil exports, and 35 percent of its barley. Think about it: who is making a killing, and who is the prey?

Build a Productive Nation Again!

Speculation now runs amok. The sanctions policies are driving half of the world away from the dollar as the international medium of exchange. With no other currency to replace it in sight, the Biden collective chose this week to backhandedly announce its backing for cryptocurrencies.

No wonder that the daily derivatives market in cryptocurrencies is already as large as the daily activity of the New York Stock Exchange floor! 

In short, the British Empire-centred international financial oligarchy is doubling-down on global market speculation, while grinding the entire world economy to a virtual halt. Likewise, this same oligarchy shows no signs of giving up its “green” Malthusian agenda of global depopulation—be it through famine, disease, or war.

The actual war which will determine whether or not we survive, is not the shooting war taking place 6000 miles away in Ukraine. It is the political war to return this nation to economic sovereignty while defeating the globalists, starting with this year’s 2022 midterm elections. The oligarchy fears the Trump movement and President Donald Trump as much as they fear Russia and China. Their imperial economy, which has been bailed out endlessly since 2008, is facing collapse. Their response is to bring the world to the brink of world war, or beyond.

That oligarchy controls Washington, D.C. and we must now drive the British Empire’s ‘Biden Democrats’ and Republican ‘RINO’s’ and neo-cons from this nation’s capital! That also means we must bankrupt the Federal Reserve and the entire predatory, usurious international central banking system, and engineer a full return to the revolutionary national banking system of our founders and greatest leaders.

Listen in: The Global Oil & Gas Confab in Houston

This week is Ceraweek in Houston, Texas, the largest global confab of oil & gas companies, energy ministers, and market-makers from around the world. It is a timely window into the world’s unfolding and multidimensional crisis. Closed for two years due to Covid, Ceraweek is back—and contentious! Oil & gas producers, national oil companies from around the world, the proverbial ‘Arab oil sheikhs,’ national energy ministers, and the Biden collective’s greenie reps are all there and fighting it out. Of course, the Biden sanctions policy is the elephant squatting in the middle of the room—the proverbial crap that hit the fan—as all hell has been breaking loose in global energy markets.

In Ceraweek sessions and in Hilton Americas Hotel hallway conversations and interviews, oil & gas CEO’s sternly warn that without tangible commitments from the Biden collective, they cannot produce the quantities of oil and gas now suddenly demanded. Exxon’s CEO promised that Exxon will increase Permian Basin output by 100,000 barrels a day, and Chevron’s CEO promised an increase by 60,000 barrels a day—maybe by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the Biden suicide squad had just cut 600-700,000 barrels a day of imports of crude oil and other energy from Russia. About 8% of U.S. imports of oil and refined products, or about 672,000 barrels a day, came from Russia last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Nearly 75% of the Russian products imported last year were petroleum products, rather than crude oil. This includes unfinished oils such as naphtha, fuel oil, and feedstock for refiners of heavy crude. Those products are cheaper than Russian crude and are utilized by U.S. Gulf Coast oil refineries. As is well known, Europe depends on Russian natural gas and oil. The globalized, financialized, speculative market has done its math and is bidding up oil and gas futures accordingly. As Lyndon LaRouche warned, the free trade, “invisible hand” is picking your pocket.

While US oil shale producers and energy ministers from as far away as Malaysia are insisting that oil and gas will be needed well into the future, Biden “energy czar” John Kerry is holding forth from the Ceraweek stage, and to attending press, about the need to continue to shut down fossil fuels to prevent an alleged 2 ½ degree increase in global temperatures. This, as the hologram named Joe Biden, appearing in Washington D.C., ranted that oil & gas companies had 9,000 federal permits to drill and could drill today. Having waged financial warfare on the ability to obtain the credit necessary for production, this is all a political stunt by Biden—another finger pointing exercise for the credulous.

Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, also at Ceraweek, called for “an increase in short term supply” of fossil fuels. This is not a call for a sound, long-term capital investment. Oil & gas company CEOs were told for more than two years to shrink output to meet the new “Green New Deal” fascist agenda, and now are told to turn on a dime.

Oil and gas is now high-tech, with big capital outlays—nothing like the narrative of Jed Clampett, from the “Beverly Hillbillies” sitcom, taking aim with his shotgun into Pennsylvania swampland and bringing ‘black gold’ to the surface. Now oil & gas producers face supply-chain shortages, labor shortages after two years of shut-in wells, rising inflationary costs, and City of London and Wall Street hedge and equity fund ‘investors’ demanding that they buy back their own stock, rather than invest in increased production! The financial market model being pushed is Apple Inc. Apple announced on March 10th, a 20-for-1 stock split and the buying of another $10 billion of its own shares.

Those “Supply Chains”?

We now face a concatenation of overlapping crises. The entire Biden collective sanctions policy is fuelling speculative killings across commodities while Central Bank-supported green policies and bank bailouts are shutting off natural resources to the US economy. This train-wreck also intersects the already existing physical breakdown of supply chains and just-in-time production methods across the U.S.—and across much of the global economy. This writer and LaRouche PAC have reported on the origins of that physical breakdown process most recently here, and here.

Now take shipping. The entire world of container shipping was already broken by massive, trillion dollar, post-Covid imports into the U.S., which choked the arteries of global and U.S. transport. Major international container shipping conglomerates had quadrupled rates in 2021, and backed-up shipments are disrupting production throughout the real economy. Now with the new rounds of sanctions, shipping companies are scrambling to determine who is sanctioned and what can, and cannot, be shipped, and where. Starting a week before Biden’s March 8th executive order banning Russia’s petroleum products, banks and insurance companies were refusing to finance and underwrite LNG or bulk cargo from Russia, or tankers of Russian oil.

Sovcomflot is the world’s largest tanker operator by fleet size and is the quasi-nationalized shipping arm of Gazprom and Rosneft, including for LNG. What happens as Russia pivots, and devotes its fleet to deliver to China and other Asian countries? Oh, and never mind that more than 10% of sailors in the global merchant fleet are Russians: 198,123 (10.5%) of the world’s qualified seafarers are Russian, while Ukraine accounts for 76,442 (4%). As Lloyd's of London insurance warned beforehand, employers “commend them [Russian seafarers] as some of the best and most highly skilled crew out there, especially when it comes to technically sophisticated vessel types.” Imagine the implications now. Those sailors will not be available for new assignments, they will not be moving, and therefore global trade will be further restricted. 

Further, take into account air cargo capacity and rail transport, which are also being disrupted worldwide—further driving up inflationary costs. European and U.S. airlines are now banned in Russia, and Russian planes are now banned in Europe and the U.S. Carriers are left to carve out new air cargo routes overnight—delaying high value shipments and increasing air cargo costs. Flexport, Inc., a freight forwarding and customs brokerage company based in San Francisco, CA, last week likewise halted all freight rail between China and Europe, as their routes travelled through Russia.

The repercussions go on and on, as a totally avoidable East-West showdown grinds down economies and people. Skyrocketing grain prices mean that the poor, in the marginalized areas of the global South, including the Middle East, will not eat. Twenty-two European companies had invested in 38 major factories in Ukraine—producing for German automobile producers, among others. Think there are only semiconductor shortages? Ukraine-based supplier companies like Leoni, Fujikura, and Nexans are shut down or struggling to supply wire harnesses—the organized sets of wires, terminals and connectors that run throughout an entire vehicle, relaying information and electric power—forcing companies like Volkswagen and Porsche to suspend production at German plants. The freezing of Russian Central Bank reserves—including hundreds of billions of swaps in foreign currencies in transatlantic central banking systems—is now unwinding still-unknown chains of lending and borrowing. Speculators and investors have lost fortunes attempting to “short” nickel and other commodities as prices ‘blew up.’

For the moment, the world’s “equity markets” (stock markets) are gyrating up and down as commodity prices rise and then temporary drop back, move sideways, and then rise again. Any hint that Russia’s essential “special operation” in Ukraine might be settled, sets off mania; every rumoured setback sends prices spiralling down. Usurious City of London and Wall Street predators meanwhile make a literal killing, working both sides of the street.

The insanity must end! Now that you see the actual consequences of the British/Biden “sanctions” and that they will actually destroy the United States and many other nations besides, you need to let your Congressman and Senator know. We are going to throw out the RINOS and every other sort of treasonous politician and brain-dead bureaucrat—starting now. We are reinstituting the American system of national economy and national credit, ending monetarist, “financialized,” depredation once and for all.

The world will thank us for it."

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Mirrored from LaRouchePac.

The writer, Brian Lantz, currently leads the LaRouchePAC’s Political Economy Intelligence Task Force and is a founding organizer of LaRouchePAC. 

See my previous article referencing the British Oil industry giant BP here:

BIG OILY LIES

Farmers from across Greece have gathered in Athens to protest over increasing production costs as gas and fertilizer prices soar amid the Ukraine crisis.
Something tells me this is just the beginning! > > https://odysee.com/Greece_19:06d5ea760656391ad47f7f6f709e850ef59eeabb