Supporters want to do good but now questioned how well they were doing themselves
Jacinda Ardern never understood that her guilt transfer policies that once thrilled the middle class now dismayed it.
The main reason that Miss Ardern missed the signals about her tarnishing moral robes was paradoxically her success in winning over the media to the justice of her causes from the outset of her premiership.
They tip toed around her – as did her own MPs.
The impression gathered momentum throughout the past year that Jacinda’s attentions were on more distant horizons instead of the mundane ones such as the price of groceries and the maintenance of law and order
An uncertainty began to settle over health and education.
Was the emphasis on what was being delivered? Or on which language it was being delivered in?
Jacinda Ardern pre-branded her first 12 months in office as the “Year of Deliveries.”
In her last 12 months in office there gathered within her well-to-do urban following questions centred on what was being delivered? Who was doing the ordering? And where were they based?
Were these deliveries three dimensional? Or were they internationalist notions designed to impede and generally trip up local unity and productivity?
It is symbolic that her resignation was close to the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because it was here that her cause of causes, globalisation, became unhinged.
Food “security” could no longer be taken for granted. So if New Zealand was responsible for feeding at least 40 million people beyond its own boundaries what exactly was it achieving in doing its utmost to encourage the putting out of business of farmers?
The surprise remains that there was any surprise.
Miss Ardern in announcing to a student gathering the curtailment of oil and gas exploration had laid out her agenda. Neither was it any coincidence that the students were the first to know. In so many ways Miss Ardern’s tenure was a continuation of student union activism.
Its timing was perfectly synchronised because of a huge swing away from technical and applied education and training in favour of the abstract tertiary social sciences.
The encouraged closure of the nation’s sole refinery at Marsden Point had repercussions still never understood such as that it meant the disappearance also of valuable by-products used from everything from road building materials to foodstuffs.
Miss Ardern’s early rhetorical triumphs blended with her wide-eyed over-promising still even last year created an impression that she was awaiting the opportunity to unleash the early magic.
This sense of anticipation grew more acute with the Occupation as groups disaffected by the sterner dictates of the Covid era converged on Parliament in the middle of Wellington.
The movement had actually begun in Canada, regrouped in Auckland. So there was plenty of time to prepare for it by, for example, removing all the parking places around Parliament itself.
There was a feeling that Miss Ardern would now mystically disperse the Occupiers with an “I feel your pain” type of speech.
In the event she was nowhere to be seen.
The Occupiers stayed, and stayed, and stayed until they were finally removed in a main force tough police action.
In the interval the Occupiers blocked off central city university halls so that students could not attend their lectures and public servants similarly could not get into their offices.
The urban progressive core constituency was shaken. How could this all have taken place and so close to where they lived?
The urban media now sprung to Miss Ardern’s defence by claiming that the Occupation, as it became known, was the work of the far right.
This conflicted with visual evidence that demonstrated that the disgruntled were a cross section of New Zealand society.
It was now that there began to start a series of attacks characterised by ram raids on small businesses in Auckland and these went on and on.
Once again the urban progressives began wondering where exactly was Miss Ardern?
Why was she not, for example, performing a workaday Member of Parliament stunt such as at least venturing out into the night in a police patrol car?
She seemed disinterested.
The urban educated professional class progressives want to do good and more importantly still want to be seen doing it.
They also want and expect to do well personally.
Davos Money Makeover hots up while South Island Rivers cool Banking Circuits
The World Economic Forum’s cryptocurrency priority as the centrepiece of its “internet of value” explains the intensity of the interest now by the global technology community in New Zealand providing the two essential components for this development.
One of these is mechanical. The other is ethical.
The mechanical component is the provision of the enhanced cooling required by the server farms hosting the accelerated technology.
The guiltless component is that the power driving the cooling systems is itself derived from renewable sources instead of fossil fuels.
The internet technology majors often infer that the server farms driving their networks have surpassed the mechanical world and operate neurally i.e. like the human brain – in waves.
Not so. They are still mechanical and need cooling.
The refrigerant has to be boosted for cryptocurrency because the process needs additional levels of circuitry density and usage just because the mathematical formula under process is so complex that the intensified binary activity generates the extra heat.
The south of New Zealand’s South Island is the ideal location for the cryptocurrency server farms because it is cool in those latitudes due to the region’s proximity to the Antarctic.
Another benefit is that the alpine refrigeration cannot be traced to oil, gas or coal. It is guilt-free.
A little-understood power usage effectiveness covenant requires the key players not only to sidestep fossil fuelled energy but to ensure also that a minimum proportion of operating costs is consumed by the approved renewable variety.
This is why there is so much activity now in calibrating server farm cooling energy sources in places like Clyde, Roxburgh, Makarewa, and Monowai and other places where snow and ice fed rivers run through them
Taxpayer commitment or “collaboration” in these schemes remains to be defined.
It is now 40 years since Gordon Hogg the founding chief executive of New Zealand’s Databank the world’s first trading bank information sharing cooperative saw the future in positioning the era’s air conditioned mainframe data centres where it was already cold.
He foresaw data centres installed in caverns in the Southern Alps (pictured.)
There the concept rested until the internet and social media sector in its virtuous search to distance itself from fossil fuels only quite recently revisited the economic and ethical blend in the rivers sourced in these same Southern Alps.
This in turn becomes a confluence with the evolving cryptocurrency movement advocated by the World Economic Forum of Davos fame as “revolutionizing the exchange of value – as the internet did for the exchange of information.” The WEF views it as the new “model for ownership.”
The WEF views cryptocurrency as the conduit for the “unbanked” to participate in the global economy. Something it claims that the existing global banking hegemony fails to enable
This fits neatly into the great re-set WEF makeover philosophy of which New Zealand’s Labour government is a stand-out cheerleader.
Alpine-grade cooling is required for cryptocurrency hosting because of the new currency’s customer technique known as data mining. This is the disintermediated user buy-in system, a do-it-yourself one, which needs very heavy duty binary crunching capacity.
The word mining is designed to conjure up gold rush images. It also indicates the heavy mathematical lifting in order for myriad formulae routines to squeeze through the binary bottleneck at ever greater speed to emerge as recognisable data and do so instantly.
Just as a motor vehicle under high revs requires more cooling so does a server farm at full load.
The World Economic Forum views the global banking hegemony as an impediment to the equitable global re-distribution of wealth.
The internet and social media technology leaders in their role as intermediary processors see this Davos-inspired levelling up as an opportunity to signal that they are on the same blameless path by putting distance between their operations and fossil energy sources.
Given the New Zealand government’s activist role in the WEF franchise the question arises if the alpine cooling for the server farms is economically as well as morally feasible.
The alpine cooling plan has the logic of using existing resources i.e. the alpine rivers in establishing a new industry without obliterating high value existing ones.
It compares with the drive to carpet over with solar hardware dairy farms situated on the outskirts of tourist townships.
It compares too with the foresting over of New Zealand’s prime farmland in order to allow foreign owners to make messes in their own countries.
Meanwhile in the Davos/WEF global context there will be interest by the technical community in the Clyde server scheme which blends electro-environmental and mechanical imperatives.
The scheme aligns in close proximity the temperature managed power source on the river, with the mechanical server farm itself. This means using Direct Current only and by-passing conversion into AC. This clean electricity is an extra environmental safety factor in containing radiation fallout.
Electromagnetic Radiation Field peril to Public Health ignored in New Zealand government’s single minded rush to please Internationals
Deliberate state policy fast tracks industrial scale solar installations by plugging them into town electrical substations to take advantage of in-place national grid connections. This campaign is now revealed as having failed to take into consideration the consequent proven adverse effects on community health and safety.
This is surprising because the founding world authority on the effect of electromagnetic clusters on humans was New Zealander Dr Neil Cherry.
He was associated with the other world authority Professor Robert Becker researcher in electrophysiology and electro medicine at the Veterans Administration Hospital of New York.
Professor Becker stated:-
“I have no doubt in my mind that, at the present time, the greatest polluting element in the earth’s environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields.”
Meanwhile an Australian study now concludes that Dr Neil Cherry discovered that electromagnetic radiation: -
“Caused DNA breakages, chromosome aberrations, increased oncogene activity in cells, altered brain activity, altered blood pressure and increased brain cancer at very low levels – much lower than those allowed by the Australian standard.”
The Australian study continues …….
“He also found that it impacts on the pineal gland in the brain, resulting in a reduction of melatonin – a vital part of many of the body’s biochemical systems, including the mediation of many hormone functions (including the control of weight) and a major scavenger of damaging free radicals.”
The Helensville power scheme planned to cover the town’s signature panorama vista (pictured in diagram above) is under planning review by the Auckland City Council.
The overseas-promoted generator installation scheme hugs the Helensville township so closely that residents note that the structural equipment actually intrudes into the town itself.
Further south the extent of the neighbourhood open array generating capacity campaign is revealed by the two international developers anticipating connecting up to the Greytown substation in order to pump into the national grid enough power for several cities in addition to the township of Greytown itself.
At issue is why the impact on human health of these immense electrical generating installations and their electromagnetic radiation fields is ignored?
This indifference is in contrast to the government-inspired urgency when for example the discovery of a sliver of asbestos on a building site triggers health and safety regulations requiring everyone on the site to vacate it immediately.
The government meanwhile intensifies the at-any-cost focus around its unifying rallying policy of being seen globally to eliminate carboniferous-derived energy.
There is a question. In this process has the government enshrined solar-derived power as the jewel in the international recognition crown it so intensely covets?
With New Zealand’s now recognised early work on identifying the damaging effects to human life of exposure to extensive clusters of electromagnetism there is another unanswered question.
It is why nobody in any official capacity explains the health and safety consequences.
If anyone in any capacity questions anyone at any level of official responsibility about this they are condescendingly dismissed as mere conspiracy theorists. There is no follow-up.
Yet for how long can the threat of electromagnetic radiation fields be so routinely brushed off?
Especially as there now emerges disclosures of the various schemes to position these vast arrays alongside town boundaries and in doing so endangering the neighbouring population densities.
Dr Neil Cherry eminent scientist identified electromagnetic equipment and cancer, cardiac link
The government sponsored experiment to position very large scale solar generating installations on the boundaries of towns in order to take advantage of their existing close-in substations runs counter to the warnings of a pioneering environmental health scientist about the danger to human health of the resulting electromagnetic radiation fields.
The scientist was Dr Neil Cherry now acknowledged as the global pioneer in researching and then publishing his discoveries centred on the threat to humans of exactly these types of large scale concentrations of electromagnetic radiation fields.
Dr Neil Cherry of Lincoln University was also a three term Environment Canterbury Councillor and an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
The two towns scheduled to have these electromagnetic installations the size of large-herd dairy farms affixed onto their boundaries are Helensville and Greytown.
Dr Cherry said that guidelines from international standard setters gave insufficient emphasis to the extent of the radiation effect on human health.
He insisted that any degree of radiation beyond threshold i.e. natural level was a threat to human health and this compounded with the intensity of it beyond this natural state. He described such radiation as “electronic smog.”
Children he identified as being notably vulnerable because of their undeveloped immune systems.
Dr Cherry’s applied research has re-surfaced in connection with the Helensville suburban solar installation and its radio frequencies.
The Auckland City Council which administers Helensville has sought developer assurance on ICNIRP “guidelines” on “maximum exposure levels”
The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection was specifically cited by Dr Cherry as having inadequate guidelines based on biased industry data.
His constant challenging of the conventional wisdom remains a landmark.
He remains one of the very few in authority to take to task the World Health Organisation and its assessment of the level of threats presented by electromagnetic fields which Dr Cherry said was lax.
He criticised the high level of “industry dominance” in institutions responsible for setting safety standards.
Dr Cherry insisted that electromagnetic fields and their radiation damage DNA and accelerate cell death rates.
They enhance he stated the rates of cancer, cardiac, reproductive and neurological disease and impact mortality in human populations.
The essential human hormone melatonin was particularly vulnerable, he insisted.
The only “safe” exposure level is zero, he concluded
Dr Cherry believed that the greater the output of the electromagnetic field the greater the radiation and thus the greater the cumulative threat to public health.
Had Dr Cherry lived now it seems unlikely that foreign developers would currently seek to use New Zealand towns as international test sites for low-cost large scale solar generation.
He believed that as the evidence for the dangerous cumulative effects of electromagnetic radiation increased, so did official acceptance and toleration of it also increase.
Neil Cherry died at 56. His expertise in numerous applied sciences allowed him to relate events in one field to repercussions in quite another.
His value today is that he coupled what was going on in science with what was going in the health of everyday people.
He was more renowned overseas than in New Zealand. He appeared before the European Parliament among others.
He campaigned to have electromagnetic radiation officially described for all district planning purposes as “a contaminant” on the grounds that it changed the composition of the air.
Dr Cherry pointed out that the human body is regulated by electrical impulses and was thus vulnerable to interference from nearby artificial electromagnetic radiation sources and the greater the extent of the radiation, the greater the danger to human health.
He stood for Parliament as an electorate candidate for the Labour Party.
Coy quip camouflages Ardern Appointment with Destiny
Winsomely deflecting the unspoken question posed on the nation’s independent free-to-air television TV3 morning talk show New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern declared spontaneously that she was aware of a rumour that she might resign and even move to “New Plymouth.”
Nobody dares to follow up this typically adept, humorous, and ironic trade mark diversion by doing a simple translation in which New York instead of New Plymouth is the actual destination.
Ironic because the New Zealand New Plymouth is the capital of the nation’s energy producing region and where the premier for the last five years has turned off the spigot on things like natural gas and oil.
Tremulously the mainstream media gingerly tip toes around the evidence that the prime minister is a putative candidate for the world’s most important bureaucratic job and which happens to be based in New York.
In her empathetic way the prime minister has joked about her early dreams to “save the world.”
She may soon be in the nominal position to accomplish it.
The current incumbent Antonio Guterres began his second and final four year term at the start of this year.
This means that the job becomes vacant at the end of 2026. No secretary general since Kurt Waldheim has sought to extend their job beyond the two four year terms.
What is Jacinda Ardern’s special appeal? Qualification?
It is her unrelenting priority given to climate. First foremost and always.
Ever since Boutros Boutros-Galli was vetoed for a second term because of the organisation’s failure to resolve violent conflicts in places like Africa and the Balkans the organisation has known it had to change its emphasis, change course.
This transformation was refined under Galli’s successor Ban Ki-moon who rearranged the organisation around environment in general and climate in particular.
This focus became even more concentrated, intense, under his successor, Antonio Guterres.
The original attempt by Jacinda Ardern’s mentor Helen Clark to secure the secretary-general post by using the New Zealand prime minister’s job as the leaping-off point came closer to fruition than most people realise with Ms Clark eventually heading the midfield in a list of highly qualified aspirants.
A problem for the former prime minister was that when she made her run it was still too early to identify the evolving consolidation around the new flagship cause and purpose.
In marketing terms it was a re-branding around a single product line.
The value became obvious when it allowed the gigantic global bureaucracy to skate over its shortcomings in matters of identifying plague and containing violent conflicts.
Ms Ardern from the outset hewed to climate as the identifying cause of our time.
She has refused to be distracted.
To helm the organisation a candidate needs to be nominated by their own country and this will be forthcoming regardless of the party in government at that time.
The key time frame is the cusp of 2026/27 when her ally Antonio Guterres ends his second term. She needs however to be up and running as a candidate quite some time before this to gain momentum.
The selection of the secretary general is the secular version of the papal election conclave. It only lacks the plume of smoke.
Does Ms Ardern follow Ms Clark and do an apprenticeship in New York similar to Ms Clark’s running the Development Programme?
The bubbling up of the camouflaged conjecture about the prime ministerial departure for places beginning with the word New is a conveniently ignored straw in the political wind.
Timing is everything in the high mountain tops of politics and bureaucracy and especially so if your ambition is to save the world.
The current muzzled speculation could point to a run starting toward the end of the Labour government current second term rather than during a third term.
An informed reason for the as yet publicly-unspecified speculation is that any candidacy by Ms Ardern is unlikely to be vetoed by the Security Council
This is because New Zealand has trodden a conspicuously non-aligned path.
Indeed there is cause for further speculation.
It is that if Ms Clark had actually succeeded in her bid to become secretary general and with her operational experience with China via for example her pioneering Free Trade Agreement then the present emergency in Europe, the real one, could have been averted.
Liability becomes Credit with Statistical Reclassifying
A categorisation overhaul in which the pasture-economy nation’s vast grasslands are included in the emissions equation would see New Zealand classified as carbon dioxide positive instead of carbon dioxide negative.
The agricultural nation until quite recently had an entire government agency known as Grasslands which existed to refine and define the role of the herb as the central factor in the export economy.
The absence of the Grasslands organisation and the subsequent dispersal of its official responsibility and emphasis meant that its role has been left open to any number of different interpretations especially political ones.
Unlike trees grasslands store most of their carbon underground in their roots and the soil. Which makes them more reliable “carbon sinks” than forests, according to a 2018 University of California study.
These factors are recognised for example in the United States where large scale grassland proprietors receive substantial offset incentives. Ranchers are rewarded for using their grasslands to retain carbon dioxide in the ground rather than in the atmosphere.
Also through photosynthesis grass absorbs sunlight to produce energy. Grass plants will take in the heat of the sun during the day and release it slowly at night, helping to moderate temperatures
In New Zealand the pressure is on farmers to eliminate grass, the basis of the nation’s pastoral export industry, in favour of pine forestry.
This carbon farming procedure is becoming dominated by foreign interests and when the carbon credits are eventually cashed they will simply be repatriated overseas. It is these credits earned in the earlier life of the tree that contain the value.
Politicians still want to believe that there resides in the internal transaction of this financial process of carbon “farming” an export-type benefit to the nation.
These offsetting deals are becoming increasingly complex.
This is especially in regard to leasing contract structures.
This means that they benefit the non-productive if highly rewarded service sectors of the economy such as legal.
Also the burgeoning carbon “farming” consultant industry taking advantage of the curious circumstance in which secondary farmland offers similar returns to the best pasture.
This sector internationally is also aware that New Zealand’s emissions trading program is the only one in the world that allows companies to offset 100 percent of their emissions through forestry.
In this flourishing category we may also include politicians and their captive officials who always say that all this is obligatory simply because of the nation’s carbon dioxide contribution is on a “per head” basis.
This oft-uttered belief is never challenged.
This is surprising given that New Zealand has one of the lowest populations per landmass ratios of any developed nation anywhere.
It is underpopulated, in other words.
In the past era of the global population explosion forecast emergency in the late 1960s carbon dioxide was said to be an offset to the widely predicted starvation anticipated for the world to endure around current times. The era we live in now.
Carbon dioxide remains at a tiny fraction of one percent of the world’s atmosphere.
It was seen at the time of this particular postulated catastrophe as increasing in life-giving significance as the compensating minor gas vital to plant growth and thus food.
In effect it was seen as an offsetting factor to the calamity prophesy, the global starvation one, of that time.
New Zealand’s contribution to international carbon dioxide levels is barely measureable.
A reorganisation of the statistical basis of this official calculation would transform it from a debit into a credit.
Also generating the negative rather than positive impression is officially statistically generated confusion in that emissions from the different greenhouse gases are shown in carbon dioxide equivalents officially under the formula framed (CO2-e) units.
The disestablishment in quite recent times of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research along with its Grasslands Division we can see now ushered in the predominance of those other scientists, the practitioners of the social and political versions whose sway over the productive economy grows daily.
Profits by foreign parent selling to local subsidiary still unseen by politicians
Transfer pricing is the main inducement for foreign companies to invest in New Zealand infrastructure. Hiding behind nominal “Kiwi” companies they have the opportunity to attain substantial profits simply through the foreign parent selling to the New Zealand subsidiary.
The outstanding example of this was the takeover of New Zealand’s railways by a group led by Wisconsin Central Transportation Corporation.
The government impression at the time was that under the operator, Wisconsin Central, there would be attained substantial economies through the United States investor sharing its investment notably in rail ferries.
These and other similar investments were indeed sourced by the overseas company. Instead of being shared, as was popularly supposed at the time, they were in fact sold at considerable margin to the New Zealand company, the subsidiary.
The background to the transfer pricing opportunity was a wave of political emphasis at the time on privatisation.
Wisconsin Central played into the free market trend constantly stressing their fine aspirations for the now unrestricted nation and its people.
The transfer pricing infrastructure opportunity currently lies with the international companies and their New Zealand subsidiaries standing by to take a similarly loftily-expressed advantage of their close-in solar power installations planned for urban settlements and their national grid links.
There is nothing illegal in transfer pricing. It is unusual only in that those who should be aware of it are either ignorant about it. Or find it hard to discuss it.
Wisconsin Central excitement meant that the shares of the by now publicly traded New Zealand operation touched almost $10.
Five years later these “long hold” shares had dropped to 30cents.
Soon after this the state had to reacquire what it should never have disposed of which is its essential rail system.
The problems of Wisconsin Central and the New Zealand railways infrastructure amounted to the absence of follow up investment following the acquisition.
These deficiencies are said to be reflected in the continuing poor state of the permanent way, the rail lines.
There is some truth in this.
The subsequent public New Zealand retake up of rail ownership and management has grappled with this while doing its best to refurbish the most obvious signs of neglect such as the railway stations .
The lesson now is just that the lesson was not learned.
Possessed of a new belief, and one rooted in popular culture, the state is again, even more enthusiastically, handing over chunks of infrastructure, the electrical one this time, to foreign companies with local subsidiaries.
Experience again shows that transfer pricing, the captive and thus profitable trading between foreign companies and their local subsidiaries, again gets a foothold during an urban class modish clamour.
The privatisation one at the end of the last century was an example and the energy supply one is the current version.
Groundswell Unbowed hews to productivity which will combat Famine, Starvation
Once all-powerful farmer representatives must now sit on their organisational hands while they see the nation’s most important industry engulfed in the government’s evangelical-grade fervour designed to simultaneously cut back pastoral productivity while inflicting more tax on it
Federated Farmers knows that the level of official excitability is now so volatile that any discernible campaign to introduce topics such as balance of payments and export revenues will only act as an accelerant.
They know too that the government’s determination to portray New Zealand and thus itself universally as the shining city on the hill has become baked-in as its peak policy.
Farmer representative institutions know that they must not be seen to impede the passage of the carriers of this particular grail in its journey to the world wide approbation that the bearers have been led to believe is so very much within their grasp.
In their fear of inserting a stick into this ants nest of a belief system the farm hierarchy displays characteristics of those confronted by a determined bull. They remain motionless.
So does His Majesty’s Opposition the National Party.
It weaves its way around schemes such as the one to plant trees on tracts of fertile grazing land. This is for no other purpose than to provide counterweights for foreign polluters seeking a book keeping entry somewhere else to demonstrate their own purity of purpose.
It refrains from pointing out that if the nation has an energy crisis, then it is a contrived one.
It is caused by the official decision to restrict access among other things to the nation’s abundant natural gas, not so long ago acclaimed as the clean alternative to coal gas.
Another curiosity takes the form of the lingering adhesion to the drying out side of the old change spectrum weather equation.
In the event precipitation and inundation in the region have been the most sinister occurrences.
This does not impede the government’s determination to run its show-boating solar farms over the most easily accessible flat land including pasture flood plains.
New Zealand’s contribution to the trace gas carbon dioxide is sufficiently miniscule to be only just calculable in fractions of decimals.
The Guardian is a handbook of this self-regarding movement. It routinely predicts for the world a great famine and a pending era of starvation.
Yet in New Zealand nobody dare warn about the deliberate exacerbation of this scourge embodied in the government’s own consecrated priority policy.
There is silence on perils in this context of timbering over pasture land and then inflicting punitive taxation on ruminants grazing in the diminishing available pastures.
These are the pastures carrying the world’s food supplies, repositories of food “security” as the government likes to say.
In a nation in which the words “the science” are never far from the lips of any government politician or official seeking to establish for themselves an aura of piety there is another curiosity.
It is that none of these people know, or even if they do know, are still too frightened to impart the fact that carbon dioxide is essential scientifically to plant growth.
Rogue farmer organisations notably Groundswell remain unimpressed by abstract government contentions centred on the fashionable academic notion of “modelling.”
One reason is that still fresh in their memory is the unnecessary official hysteria during the Covid era triggered by these very “modelling” exercises and their wild inaccuracy.
In order to by-pass the delicate and staged tap dancing of the National Party or Federated Farmers, Groundswell deals direct by taking its rural productivity case to where the votes are which is in the cities.
The government has imbued its narrowly self-serving cause as a noble endeavour of totemic global proportions.
Rouble’s new oil exchange currency status is just the start warns international banker
After being surprised by the Sino Soviet military alliance, the West must now accept the reality of Sino Soviet manoeuvring to establish a joint reserve currency challenging the USD.
This is the conclusion of leading Middle East banker Meguerditch Bouldoukian the former deputy governor of the Bank of Lebanon and the world authority on correspondent banking the system under which trading banks cooperate with one another internationally.
In an interview with MSC Newswire he observed that since the end of the Cold War the West had seen “what it wanted to see,” and believed “what it wanted to believe” instead of confronting realities.
This had been characterised by its shared imperative to signal its moral superiority to the Sino-Soviet bloc by for example weakening its own competitive structure in its pursuit of environmental “perfection.” This policy vastly empowered the bloc through the transfer to it of Western currency.
This enabled Russia to lay the groundwork for its underpinning ambition which is to use its relatively new status as a leading global energy resource to “supplant the petro dollar system and with it the reserve currency system too.”
Anyone doubting this said Mr Bouldoukian only had to experience the fact that access to Russian oil and gas is now readily available to buyers “only too willing to settle in currencies other than US dollars.”
“Russia by itself even after its empowerment by the West as a petro state simply does not have the clout to follow this through.
“But in combination with the yuan this possibility of a reserve currency does now take on the outline of a reality.”
United States foreign policy following World War II was to split China off from Russia.
The fall of the Berlin Wall had induced however in Western leadership and especially in the United States and the EU an ‘’illusory and even euphoric” sense that the threat “singly or together” from the old bloc had evaporated.
Even now the threat posed by the two countries working in harmony to challenge the international banking system and its underlying correspondent banking network was being routinely shrugged off, he noted.
Can such a combination replace the US dollar in the international payments system and will the US dollar remain dominant worldwide?
A rival reserve currency Mr Bouldoukian stressed must be capable of being used:-
- For the settlement of international commercial transactions
- For financial transactions short & long term borrowings on the one side and for investments and savings purposes on the other:
- As a reserve currency for central banks and other international financial institutions
Mr Bouldoukian noted that Russia’s economic reforms started in the early 1990s and were inspired by the model of securities regulation that originated in the USA but in practical terms these were decoupled from the actual US model.
It was now that Russia’s economy started to depend heavily on fossil fuel exports, the prices of which determined the value of everything else in Russia.
This over-reliance on fossil exports was always dangerous. “But as we have seen the naiveté of the West played very much into Russia’s hands and continues to do so to this day.”
Russia’s ability to squeeze every advantage out of the West’s blindness has meant “and this has to be acknowledged” that the rouble is a now leading currency for the world energy trade, he stated.
The United States he noted had failed to understand that the German proclaimed high moral purpose in letting Russia take over the role of its own nuclear and traditional power sources merely disguised a recurrence of Germany’s always-present vulnerability to political extremism.
Germany now became near-dependent on Russia for all its raw materials and did so under the camouflage of being seen to do good in the eyes of the United States and EU political class, Mr Bouldoukian added.
In order to avoid a Sino-Soviet alternate reserve currency he urged Western leaders to beware of implementing the ostentatious “high minded ideals” of this class and instead focus on the now manifest economic threat being posed by the formation of the rival reserve currency.
An example now of the imminence of this threat to global banking he insisted was that the rival reserve currency was already undergoing market testing and positioning.
Russia is directing a development project with BRICS nations dedicated to its cherished reserve currency strategy, warned Mr Bouldoukian.
Helensville and Greytown Hold Line against Solar Tsunami while elected stay gagged
Solar power station coverage of dairy pasture is a policy win-win for the government. The first win is for its renewables scheme. The second is by eliminating the cows blamed for creating half New Zealand’s greenhouse gases.
The halve-the-herd cry is routinely on the lips of activists unconcerned by the fact that the dairy industry is the nation’s chief export earner.
Tourism was the runner-up man foreign currency earner until Covid restricted world travel. Its recovery is now threatened by solar carpeting such heritage areas as Helensville and Greytown.
Concerned residents in the threatened towns are worried about the idealised artists impressions of these power stations which portray shoulder-high panels widely separated and with sheep grazing on the ample verdant pasture beneath.
Their research (pictured above) shows a quite different picture of the mechanical structural configuration relative to its surroundings.
The standard bearer for the resistance is the township of Helensville which has quite literally been under siege since the end of 2021 when the extent to which it was to be surrounded by a solar site began to leak out.
The point man for the entire resistance movement is Marco Scuderi
Mr Scuderi is a globally-recognised shipwright and yacht designer-builder who had no previous role in politics local or national.
So where exactly are the people elected and indeed paid to put a brake on exactly this type of state-backed disruption?
There is more. Suppression of public debate is through the government guiding the coverage of the topic in the mainstream media it does not directly control. This is achieved operationally through the Public Interest Journalism subsidy allocation system.
Greytown residents having discovered that a 500 acre solar power site was to be tacked onto its southern edges then proceeded to discover that another 500 acre generating plant had been tacked onto the other side of the town electricity substation – this time heading in the general direction of Martinborough another tourist town and famed for its vineyards.
The fact that New Zealand is embarking on its first generation of industrial capacity solar power stations is another camouflaged issue.
This because in this first flush of government-sponsored zeal there is no taking into consideration the negative aftermath of these plants installed a generation ago in the United States and which are described alarmingly in Michael Moore’s film Planet of the Humans.
With thousands of acres of dairy land in Waikato and Taupo designated for solar development the loss of export revenue set against the cost of importing all the solar equipment is an issue. Also sidestepped is the degree to which energy supply has been compromised by the political decision to turn off natural gas for instance.
There are substantially over 100 large scale solar site applications pending in New Zealand and this energy Klondike has much to do with planning regulations that make no distinction at all between pastoral farming and solar farming.
The government has set a solar forced march. It is underlined by the government’s disquieting willingness to dismantle the Covid immigration barriers for those able to accelerate the pace.
Neither is it too fussed about the people it tramples on in its swift advance.
Still, there must be surprise that the sternest resistance has come from places such as Helensville and Greytown both heritage grade retirement destinations.