Nord Streams and the Bagel of Doom

the 3D Reset: Depopulation, Dispossession and Destruction

In this episode, I’ll be looking at Seymour Hirsch and his bombshell story on Biden’s order to blow up the Nord Streams and how it was accomplished. And I’ll tie it into Michael Hudson’s early predictions that this is the third time Germany has been defeated in a century.

While East Palestine was hit by the ‘bomb train,’ Northern California just weathered bomb rain in the curiously named ‘bomb cyclone.’ And still, only a handful of the houses destroyed by the CZU Lightning Fires two years ago have been rebuilt, here by the ocean where we have neither lightning nor cyclones.

I’ll examine whether there’s a 3D Reset agenda: depopulation, dispossession and destruction. And I’ll end by tying this all together with the Black Hole Bagel in the excellent movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Whew!

Although it’s not a surprise to anyone with a lick of sense, Seymour Hirsch has confirmed the obvious—Russia did not blow up its own pipelines. Hirsch has broken this scoop involving three months of investigative journalism on Substack. His anonymous source has left MSM without a specific person to discredit, only the idea that “investigative” journalism should rely only on officials who shuffle between hefty government paychecks and lucrative media roles. Lotta incentive to blow the whistle there!

Instead, Hirsch provides source credibility the way real journalism always does, by providing a wealth of details no outsider could know, that are internally consistent and jive with the known facts. And remember, dismissing his evidence is the easy part, coming up with a viable alternative is what no one in the mainstream is even attempting.

In an episode from last March called Putin’s Peace, Petrodollar Pain, I quoted leading geopolitical economist Michael Hudson:

So what you’re seeing is not the US backfiring and shooting it in their foot by creating a world crisis. That’s the idea! Because it realizes that in the world crisis, energy prices are going to go way up, benefiting the US balance of payments. Not only as an energy exporter, but the oil companies that control the world oil trade, once they exclude Russia from it, agricultural crop prices will go way up, benefiting the United States as an agricultural exporter, especially if they prevent Ukrainian and Russian wheat exports, and this is going to create a debt crisis for third world countries whose debts are coming due. And the United States can use this debt crisis to force them, or attempt to force them, if they go along with it, to continue privatizing and selling off their public domain to US buyers so they can sell off their patrimony in order to get the money to pay the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports…. The US strategy is to create exactly the world crisis that you are presented as being accidental. … Look at what they’re doing as deliberate. Don’t assume they’re dumb. They’re smart—they’re evil, but they’re not dumb.

…certainly it’s going to cause suffering in the short term for these countries. Over the longer-term … we’re going to have to become self-sufficient in the main pressure points. We’re going to have to produce our own food. Not import our wheat. We’re going to have to shift away from growing export plantation crops and have our own grain, maybe return to family size farming to do all this. We’re going to have to produce our own arms, we’re going to have to have our own fuel sources, and that would include solar energy and renewable energy to become independent of the American-dominated oil and gas and coal trade. So the longer-term, even medium-term effect of all of this is going to make other countries self-sufficient and independent.

There will be a lot of interruptions, even starvation, a lot of property transfers and disruption, but over the long term, the United States… is destroying the idea of a single interconnected globalized order because it’s separated Europe and North America from the whole rest of the world….

Neoliberalism impoverishes. Neoliberalism is a class war against labour by finance, primarily, and a class war against industry. A class war against governments. It’s the financial class really against the whole rest of society seeking to use debt leverage to control companies, countries, families and individuals by debt.

In my Feb 2022 episode, Theodicy, Hegemony & Michael Hudson on Ukraine, I quote from an article Michael Hudson wrote called America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century. I think there’s no one more prescient on geo-economics than Hudson. He writes about the FIRE sector of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate:

Internationally, the FIRE sector’s aim is to privatize foreign economies (above all to secure the privilege of credit creation in U.S. hands), so as to turn government infrastructure and public utilities into rent-seeking monopolies to provide basic services (such as health care, education, transportation, communications and information technology) at maximum prices instead of at subsidized prices to reduce the cost of living and doing business.

President Biden … has been demanding for over a year that Germany prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from supplying its industry and housing with low-priced gas and turn to the much higher-priced U.S. suppliers.

U.S. officials first tried to stop construction of the pipeline from being completed. Firms aiding in its construction were sanctioned, but finally Russia itself completed the pipeline. U.S. pressure then turned on the traditionally pliant German politicians, claiming that Germany and the rest of Europe faced a National Security threat from Russia turning off the gas, presumably to extract some political or economic concessions. No specific Russian demands could be thought up, and so their nature was left obscure and blob-like. Germany refused to authorize Nord Stream 2 from officially going into operation.

A major aim of today’s New Cold War is to monopolize the market for U.S. shipments of liquified natural gas (LNG). Already under Donald Trump’s administration, Angela Merkel was bullied into promising to spend $1 billion building new port facilities for U.S. tanker ships to unload natural gas for German use. The Democratic election victory in November 2020, followed by Ms. Merkel’s retirement from Germany’s political scene, led to cancellation of this port investment. This left Germany without much alternative to importing Russian gas to heat its homes, power its electric utilities, and to provide raw material for its fertilizer industry and hence the maintenance of its farm productivity.

So the most pressing U.S. strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices, above all to the detriment of Germany. In addition to creating profits and stock-market gains for U.S. oil companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy. Thus looms the third time in a century that the United States will have defeated Germany – each time increasing its control over a German economy increasingly dependent on the United States for imports and policy leadership, with NATO being the effective check against any domestic nationalist resistance.

Higher gasoline, heating and other energy prices also will hurt U.S. consumers and those of other nations (especially Global South energy-deficit economies) and leave less of the U.S. family budget for spending on domestic goods and services. This could squeeze marginalized homeowners and investors, leading to further concentration of absentee ownership of housing and commercial property in the United States, along with buyouts of distressed real estate owners in other countries faced with soaring heating and energy costs. But that is deemed collateral damage by the post-industrial blob.

Food prices also will rise, headed by wheat. (Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports.) This will squeeze many Near Eastern and Global South food-deficit countries, worsening their balance of payments and threatening foreign debt defaults.

My only caveat to Hudson’s excellent analysis is that the “buyouts of distressed real estate owners” is fuel for the FIRE, not collateral damage. And keep in mind that Hudson’s article was a month before the charges were placed and seven months before the bombs were detonated. Seymour Hirsch gives a similar account of motive:

From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.

America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.

Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.

I differ from Hirsch in two statements: that Russian oligarchs were in the thrall of Putin and that America’s political fears were real. In fact, the freezing of assets outside of Russia freed Putin from the oligarchs controlling him. Without the US doing him that favor, he would not have been able to throw off the shackles of the petrodollar and SWIFT system, and implement the plan developed by his economic advisor Sergei Glazyev.

And who is the America that fears a thriving Germany or Russia, with ample energy and robust trade? That’s not me, is it you? Hirsch then confirms that America is just the one Hudson said—a government representing the interests of their election donors and not the people. He writes:

Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.

Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”

A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.

There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.” 

So Biden was held hostage by the Senate, who were unanimous in passing a law that stopped ‘the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas’ in its tracks. And somewhere he decided to go the Senate one better and blow up both Nord Stream 1 and 2 with the complicity of the Norwegian Navy.

What will be the fallout of this? I predict that Germans will no longer tolerate being part of NATO, buying US oil or gas, sending weapons to Ukraine, and perhaps being in the EU with the traitor Norway. I see Russia repairing the pipelines and making sure that Norway is not a recipient, unless they similarly renounce their government and NATO ties. I think the alliance between Germany and Russia, which Churchill may have provoked a world war to prevent, is destiny.

And what of us, the US? Biden may have pulled the trigger but the entire Senate, if not the whole House, put him up to it in no uncertain terms. Even if there was a World Court that cared, it has no power to indict a whole government. Only we have that power. What they can do is turn the trade tables on us with sanctions, something the plummeting petrodollar makes easy. We could get pretty isolated in our castle with the 12,000-mile moat on one side and 4000-miles on the other. Let us eat cake!

Knowing there’s nothing they wouldn’t do if they could, ask yourself if the bomb train was negligence or intent? When a month-long ‘bomb cyclone’ pummels an area known for drought, with unforeseen ocean surges? When lightning sparks dozens of forest fires in a single night, although lightning has never been seen before or since? It isn’t a question of whether they would, only whether they could and did.

But let’s not part ways with this downer. Let’s talk about the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once which, on one level, is about the relationship between a Chinese mother and her daughter, and on another, is about overlapping universes with outrageous costumes, stunning martial arts, slapstick comedy, and deep metaphysical questions about good and evil. And of course, it’s about the bagel of doom, the black hole created by putting EVERYTHING on a bagel, which looks eerily similar to the donut of doom at sea when the pipelines blew up.

I can’t convey the multi-dimensional intensity of the jam-packed scenes, not recommended for anyone who gets over-stimulated, but the turning point is a speech given by the husband that’s an impassioned plea for everyone to be kind, “we need to just be kind.” And as the mother tries it as her fighting technique, things change. The villains and thugs transform into other humans, with feelings. In the real and the surreal world, people talk, dance, chase after pet raccoons, throw themselves as rocks down a mountain to catch another rock. The bagel of nihilism, the desire to just end it all, is something she can save her daughter from.

What if it’s true? What if saving the world depended on you healing just one relationship? Isn’t it worth a try?

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Although I’m tempted to follow this with videos about love, we owe it to the Germans and Russians and Ukrainians to look deep inside the black hole of doom looming over them. So here’s the Michael Hudson episodes I mentioned: Putin’s Peace, Petrodollar Pain (Substack version):

Adds new info on Ukraine from Aaron Mate, the US Peace Council, Scott Ritter and Michael Hudson. Asks whether there were diplomatic options that Russia could have pursued but didn't. Examines Putin's strategy in having $650B of Russian gold in foreign banks subject to seizing and freezing. Was it a trap so he could repudiate the petrodollar? Has the US done him a favor by bankrupting the Russian oligarchs? What does this mean for Germany and France that they'll need to buy oil and gas in the petroruble? And how much trickle-down pain will there be when petroleum-based fertilizer factories shut down? Lastly, could this be a catalyst for taking back local economies and making them productive?

and Theodicy, Hegemony and Michael Hudson on Ukraine:

Is it a waste of time to talk about meaning and purpose with pandemics waning and Ukraine waxing? This episode applies ancient theological debates to capitalism. It looks at how leading geopolitical economist Michael Hudson views the Russia conflict along with U Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer, who Matt Taibbi says is quickly becoming infamous. Brings it back to why meaning matters.