Have you heard of “Operation 24”? Some refer to it as Russia’s 2024 problem — that is the time when Russian President Vladimir Putin will have to step down from his final term in that role, and the country’s elites will have to decide whom they offer up as their new puppet in that role.
In case you thought Putin would be giving up power, I am sorry to bring you the news, but he will not.
All the way back in 2000, during his first year in power, Putin created the State Council. As Time reports, “Made up of regional governors and other officials selected by Putin, the Council formally serves as an advisory body to the Kremlin but, throughout its existence, has been known primarily as a state appendage whose function no one quite understood.”
That is until two years ago, when Putin first proposed changing Russia’s constitution, granting the State Council new powers. At the time, “some observers to speculate that, after Putin’s term runs out in 2024, he could decide to take the helm of the State Council and effectively continue to govern Russia from there.”
This would occur via a new yet prominent status as “father of the nation” while he leaves his children to run things in his technical absence. The Carnegie Moscow Center reports that writer Ivan Krastev has observed, “this process is about perpetuating ‘Putinism’ in the absence of Putin himself. Krastev writes, ‘Putin’s conviction [is] that Russia needs not a single successor — as it did under Boris Yeltsin — but a successor generation. He sees the coming transition as a transfer of power from his generation to the “Putin generation,” comprising politicians who came of age during, and have been shaped by, Putin’s rule.’ The Kremlin is trying to engineer a collective succession mechanism.”
Why, though? And what does it have to do with the U.S.?
Putin has deemed that in order to bring Russia back onto the world stage as a major power, and make sure the oil and gas flow, it essentially needs to show only the U.S. that it has the willingness and the capability to go to war if necessary, and it needs to show off its capabilities since the power of war is the only thing the U.S. empire seems to respect.
Russia wants to punch the world’s bully in the nose, as Ilya Kusin wrote recently for the Wilson Center: “The 2021 April and November military maneuvers near Ukraine’s borders were yet another attempt to draw the attention of the United States, a country Russia deems to be the sole and only “real master” of the situation and the only one worth speaking to. As Putin’s December press conference showed, he doesn’t talk to Ukraine or Zelensky and he doesn’t care to. His only audience is the American elites and President Joe Biden.”
Biden has been pointing the finger at Russia for years now. Raheem Kassan, Editor in Chief of The National Pulse reminds us that, “President Barack Obama, is said to have remarked upon his Vice President’s ‘ability to f*** things up.’ And that ability has not diminished with time. So, of course, to war. Whether in lock-step or goose-step, the rest of the ruling class amplifies Biden’s thirst for something, anything that provides respite from domestic catastrophe. We are just days away from front-page headlines dubbing the tent cities across America “Bidenvilles.” Something must be done. And that thing, to paraphrase Vice President Kamala Harris, is the thing they have been doing, every day: point at Russia.”
Biden is the perfect president at the perfect time for Russia (whether that is a coincidence or not I will leave for you to decide) and has repeatedly singled out Russia for The War Machine’s attention. He has called Vladimir Putin a “killer,” and said he will “pay” for interfering in the 2020 presidential election. Biden also imposed almost two dozen new sanctions on Russia last year.
But this is not about politics on the world stage. As always, you’ll want to follow the money.
CEPA reported, “Since 2019, U.S. financial institutions have been prohibited from participating in the primary market for non-ruble denominated bonds issued by Russia’s Central Bank, National Wealth Fund, or the Ministry of Finance. The new sanctions extend this prohibition to ruble-denominated bonds issued after June 2021. This will make it increasingly difficult for Russia to raise capital on international financial markets.”
Is it any wonder the Russians are upset? And have been planning to ditch the dollar for oil and gas sales? Remember that America’s intelligence apparatus through America’s allies funded and equipped ISIS to rise up and overthrow Syria’s Assad for a pipeline to transport oil and natural gas to Eastern Europe and cut out Russia.
Russia needs markets for its oil. Oil and gas sales are responsible for more than 60 percent of Russia’s exports and provide more than 30 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Over half of Russia’s federal budget revenue comes from the country’s oil-and-gas sector — which in turn finances Putin’s ongoing military aggressions, including in Syria and Ukraine.
The oil in Iraq is still sitting in the hands of the elites who love to make war — fomented by presidents both Democrat and Republican who are recruited to further it. Iran and Russia want it. Therefore we have a permanent war for oil and the pipelines that supply it, and it’s why America goes abroad seeking monsters to slay among countries that have not attacked us and pose to us no real threat.
The mainstream media give the impression that events in Ukraine are building on their own, and the United States is just responding to them. Just as when U.S. troops had been sent to the Jordan-Syria border in the event that violence there “escalates.”
The truth is the elites manipulate events there and have been for some time. Beginning with the Bushes in Iraq, continued by the President Barack Obama regime in Syria, furthered by the Trump administration in Iran and continuing with Biden and Russia.
This is the reason to own gold and hard assets. Their prices rise with oil. Russia’s and America’s economies — and most of the world’s — are bubble economies created with pure fiat or petro-fiat currency. Wars are used by the elites to cover currency collapse and generate wealth. That’s why Washington is picking fights with oil-producing nations.
If war comes, the banksters — as always — will seek to profit leaving everyone else unprotected, unless you are prepared.
Bob Livingston
