The Nail In The Petrodollar Coffin: Gazprom Begins Accepting Payment For Oil In Ruble, Yuan

Several months ago, when Russia announced the much anticipated "Holy Grail" energy deal with China, some were disappointed that despite this symbolic agreement meant to break the petrodollar's stranglehold on the rest of the world, neither Russia nor China announced payment terms to be in anything but dollars. In doing so they admitted that while both nations are eager to move away from a US Dollar reserve currency, neither is yet able to provide an alternative.

This changed in late June when first Gazprom's CFO announced the gas giant was ready to settle China contracts in Yuan or Rubles, and at the same time the People's Bank of China announced that its Assistant Governor Jin Qi and Russian central bank Deputy Chairman Dmitry Skobelkin held a meeting in which they discussed cooperating on project and trade financing using local currencies. The meeting discussed cooperation in bank card, insurance and financial supervision sectors.

And yet, while both sides declared their operational readiness and eagerness to bypass the dollar entirely, such plans remained purely in the arena of monetary foreplay and the long awaited first shot across the Petrodollar bow was absent.

Until now.

According to Russia's RIA Novosti, citing business daily Kommersant, Gazprom Neft has agreed to export 80,000 tons of oil from Novoportovskoye field in the Arctic; it will accept payment in rubles, and will also deliver oil via the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline (ESPO), accepting payment in Chinese yuan for the transfers. Meaning Russia will export energy to either Europe or China, and receive payment in either Rubles or Yuan, in effect making the two currencies equivalent as far as the Eurasian axis is conerned, but most importantly, transact completely away from the US dollar thus, finally putin'(sic) in action the move for a Petrodollar-free world.

More on this long awaited first nail in the petrodollar coffin from RIA:

The Russian government and several of the country’s largest exporters have widely discussed the possibility of accepting payments in rubles for oil exports. Last week, Russia began to ship oil from the Novoportovskoye field to Europe by sea. Two oil tankers are expected to arrive in Europe in September.

According to Kommersant, the payment for these shipments will be received in rubles.

Gazprom Neft will not only accept payments in rubles; subsequent transfers via the ESPO may be paid for in yuan, the newspaper reported.

According to the newspaper, the change in currency was made because of the Western sanctions against Russia.

As a protective measure, Russia decided to avoid making its payments in US dollars, which can be tracked and controlled by the United States government, Kommersant reported.

"Protective measure" meaning that it was the US which managed to Plaxico itself by pushing Russia to transact away from the US Dollar, in the process showing the world it can be done, and slamming the first nail in the petrodollar's coffin.

This is not surprising to anyone who has been following our forecast of the next steps in the transition from the Petrodollar to the Gas-O-Yuan. Recall from April:

The New New Normal flow of funds:

1. Gazprom delivering gas to China.
2. China Gazprom paying in Yuan (convertible into Rubles)
3. Gazprom funding itself increasingly in Yuan.
4. Russia buying Chinese goods and services in Yuan (convertible into Rubles)

And all of this with the US banker cartel completely disintermediated courtesy of the glaring absence of the USD in any of the above listed steps, or as some may call it: from the Petrodollar to the Gas-o-yuan (something 40 central banks have already figured out... just not the Fed).

Still confused? Then read "90% Of Gazprom Clients Have "De-Dollarized", Will Transact In Euro & Renminbi" for just how Gazprom set the stage for the day it finally would push the button to skip the dollar entirely. Which it just did.

In conclusion we will merely say what we have said previously, and it touches on what will be the most remarkable aspect of Obama's legacy, because while the hypocrite "progressive" president who even his own people have accused of being a "brown-faced Clinton" after selling out to Wall Street and totally  wrecking US foreign policy abroad, is already the worst president in a century of US history according to public polls, the fitting epitaph will come when the president's policies put an end to dollar hegemony and end the reserve currency status of the dollar once and for all, thereby starting the rapid, and uncontrolled, collapse of the US empire. To wit:

In retrospect it will be very fitting that the crowning legacy of Obama's disastrous reign, both domestically and certainly internationally, will be to force the world's key ascendent superpowers (we certainly don't envision broke, insolvent Europe among them) to drop the Petrodollar and end the reserve status of the US currency.

As of this moment, both Russia and China have shown not on that it can be done, but it is done. Expect everyone to jump onboard the new superpower axis bandwagon soon enough.

Credit to Zero Hedge

10 CONSPIRACY THEORIES THAT CAME TRUE

Despite the fact that the term “conspiracy theory” has been weaponized by the establishment as a perjorative slur against anyone who questions the official narrative of any government pronouncement, there are innumerable examples throughout history of conspiracies that were proven to be true.

Let’s take a look at ten examples;

1) Operation AJAX and false flag terror
The notion that governments and intelligence agencies carry out acts of false flag terrorism has long been derided by the establishment media as a conspiracy theory, despite there being a plethora of historically documented instances.

After decades of denial, in August 2013 the CIA finallyadmitted its role in staging the coup in Iran which led to the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 under the umbrella of Operation AJAX.

Under AJAX, the CIA oversaw covert operations which included acts of false flag terror which claimed the lives of some 300 people.

2) Gulf of Tonkin
On August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson went on national television and told the nation that North Vietnam had attacked U.S. ships.

“Repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with a positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak tonight,” Johnson declared.

Congress soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which provided Johnson with pre-approved authority to conduct military operations against North Vietnam. By 1969, over 500,000 troops were fighting in Southeast Asia.

Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had bamboozled Congress and the American people. In fact, North Vietnam had not attacked the USS Maddox, as the Pentagon claimed, and the “unequivocal proof” of an “unprovoked” second attack against the U.S. warship was a ruse.

3) Operation Gladio: State Sponsored Terror Blamed on the Left
Following the Second World War, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 collaborated through NATO on Operation Gladio, an effort to create a “stay behind army” to fight communism in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

Gladio quickly transcended its original mission and became a covert terror network consisting of right wing militias, organized crime elements, agent provocateurs and secret military units. The so-called stay behind armies were active in France, Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Germany, and Switzerland.

Gladio’s “Strategy of Tension”  was designed to portray leftist political groups in Europe as terrorists and frighten the populace into voting for authoritarian governments. In order to carry out this goal, Gladio operatives conducted a number of deadly terrorist attacks that were blamed on leftists and Marxists.

In August of 1980, Gladio operatives bombed a train station in Bologna, killing 85 people. Initially blamed on the Red Brigades, it was later discovered that fascist elements within the Italian secret police and Licio Gelli, the head of the P2 Masonic Lodge, were responsible for the terror attack. Other fascist groups, including Avanguardia Nazionale and Ordine Nuovo, were mobilized and engaged in terror.

Operation Gladio ultimately claimed the lives of hundreds of people across Europe.

According to Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a Gladio terrorist serving a life-sentence for murdering policemen, the reason for Gladio was simple. It was designed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.

4) Operation Northwoods
In the covert war against the communist regime in Cuba under the CIA’s Operation Mongoose, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously proposed state-sponsored acts of terrorism in side the United States.

The plan included shooting down hijacked American airplanes, the sinking of U.S. ships, and the shooting of Americans on the streets of Washington, D.C. The outrageous plan even included a staged NASA disaster that would claim the life of astronaut John Glenn.

Reeling under the embarrassing failure of the CIA’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, president Kennedy rejected the plan in March of 1962. A few months later, Kennedy denied the plan’s author, General Lyman Lemnitzer, a second term as the nation’s highest ranking military officer.

In November of 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

5) The Gleiwitz Incident
The Gleiwitz incident refers to a false flag operation carried out by the Nazis on 31 August 1939 during which SS troops staged an attack on a German radio station and then blamed Polish troops.

German operatives dressed in Polish military garb seized the radio station, located near the Polish border, before broadcasting a short propaganda message in Polish. They then killed concentration camp victims who were also dressed in Polish uniforms and left them at the scene, making the incident look like an act of Polish aggression. The very next day Germany invaded Poland, with Hitler citing the incident as one of the pretexts.

Nine days before the incident, Hitler had told his generals, “I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”

6) Tobacco companies deliberately added addictive chemicals to cigarettes
Conspiracies are not always of a governmental nature, they can also be targeted at consumers. As the BBC reported, tobacco companies in the United States were caught deliberately engineering cigarettes for addiction by including chemicals that artificially increased the addictive kick of the product and made it taste better.

Clive Bates, director of ASH, said the discovery exposed a “scandal in which tobacco companies deliberately use additives to make their bad products even worse”.

7) Operation Fast and Furious
Operation Fast and Furious, under which the Obama administration smuggled weapons to Mexican drug lords in an apparent effort to trace the guns and bust the drug gangs, was in fact part of a conspiracy to demonize the second amendment.

Documents obtained by CBS News in December 2011 prove that ATF agents discussed how they could tie guns involved in Mexican violence to gun dealers based in the U.S with a view to passing stricter gun control regulations.

One law enforcement source told CBS News that the emails suggested the ATF created the problem itself as part of a political ploy.

“It’s like ATF created or added to the problem so they could be the solution to it and pat themselves on the back. It’s a circular way of thinking,” the source said.

8) NSA spying & mass surveillance
In the 1990′s, when anti-surveillance activists and media personalities were warning about the NSA’s huge domestic spying operation, they were treated as paranoid conspiracy theorists.

Well over a decade before the Snowden revelations, the NSA was busy intercepting and recording all electronic communications across the entire world under the Echelon program.

In 1999, the Australian government admitted that they were part of an NSA-led global intercept and surveillance program called Echelon in alliance with the US and Britain that could listen to “every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission,” on the planet.

In addition, a 2001 European Parliament report stated that “within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted” by the NSA.

9) CIA Drug Trafficking
The Central Intelligence Agency has been implicated in drug trafficking operations all over the world as well as domestically, most notably during the Iran-Contra affair, under which Contra personnel smuggled cocaine into the U.S. with the blessing of the CIA which was then distributed as crack cocaine in Los Angeles, with the profits being funneled back to the Contras.

Former Los Angeles Police Department officer Michael Ruppert also testified that he had witnessed CIA drug trafficking.

Top Mexican drug lords like Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla have also gone public to assert that they were hired by the U.S. government for drug trafficking operations. There is a voluminous body of evidence that confirms the CIA and U.S. banking giants are the top players in a global drug trade worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, information made public by the likes of Gary Webb.

10) The CIA’s heart attack gun
During Senate testimony in 1975 into illegal activities by the CIA, it was revealed that the agency had developed a dart gun capable of causing a heart attack. “At the first televised hearing, staged in the Senate Caucus Room, Chairman Church dramatically displayed a CIA poison dart gun to highlight the committee’s discovery that the CIA directly violated a presidential order by maintaining stocks of shellfish toxin sufficient to kill thousands,” a Senate web page explains.

“The lethal poison then rapidly enters the bloodstream causing a heart attack. Once the damage is done, the poison denatures quickly, so that an autopsy is very unlikely to detect that the heart attack resulted from anything other than natural causes. Sounds like the perfect James Bond weapon, doesn’t it? Yet this is all verifiable in Congressional testimony,” writes Fred Burks.

“The dart from this secret CIA weapon can penetrate clothing and leave nothing but a tiny red dot on the skin. On penetration of the deadly dart, the individual targeted for assassination may feel as if bitten by a mosquito, or they may not feel anything at all. The poisonous dart completely disintegrates upon entering the target.”

Burks suggests that Mark Pittman, a reporter who predicted the financial crisis and exposed Federal Reserve misdoings which led to a Bloomberg lawsuit against the bankster cartel, may have been assassinated with the CIA weapon.

Credit to Infowars

Merkel Slams US Hegemony? "America Can't Solve All The World's Problems Anymore"

First Russia and China, then UAE, Egypt, and Turkey... and now it appears Germany (following a phone call with Putin) is pulling the rug out from under US hegemony - just as Obama's warmongery ramps up...

• *MERKEL SAYS U.S. CAN'T SOLVE ALL THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS ANYMORE

Which is odd because just yesterday, President Obama (who never lies) stated "The United States is and will remain the one indispensable nation in the world..." adding that "no other nation can do what we do."Perhaps he is wrong?

“Even a superpower can’t solve all of the problems alone anymore,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

Merkel did not stop there...

• *PUTIN, MERKEL URGE DE-ESCALATION IN UKRAINE, KREMLIN SAYS
• *PUTIN, MERKEL DISCUSSED GAS TRANSIT VIA UKRAINE, KREMLIN SAYS
• *PUTIN INFORMED MERKEL OF NEW EAST UKRAINE AID PLAN: KREMLIN
• *MERKEL URGES HOLLANDE TO CONTINUE REFORMS IN FRANCE
• *MERKEL SAYS HOLLANDE HAS CHANCE TO REVIVE FRENCH ECONOMIC POWER

Seems like she is returning to the offensive from the defensive…

Credit to Zero Hedge

"Hosea Prophecy Around The World" Dead Birds, Fish, Cows

WHO Worker Ebola Infections Mount: Senegal Doctor Flown To Hamburg

There is reason to be concerned "about whether the proposed resources would be adequate," warns a Harvard professor as the World Health Organization 'battle strategy' draft calls for more than $430 million to bring the worst Ebola outbreak on record under control. This morning we hear of yet another health worker infected - and being flown home to Hamburg for treatment from Sengal and the WHO has shut a lab in Sierra Leone after health workers became infected. A glimpse at the following 3 charts should have the entire world throwing money at at them...

As Bloomberg reports,

More than $430 million will be needed to bring the worst Ebola outbreak on record under control, according to a draft document laying out the World Health Organization’s battle strategy.

The plan sets a goal of reversing the trend in new cases within two months, and stopping all transmission in six to nine months. It requires funding by governments, development banks, the private sector and in-kind contributions, according to the document obtained by Bloomberg News.

...

There is reason to be concerned “about whether the proposed resources would be adequate,” said Barry Bloom, a public health professor at Harvard University who also questioned whether the funds would be made available fast enough, and whether the organization’s latest plan “would ensure the expertise from WHO that is needed.”

The WHO plans to publish the plan by the end of this week at the earliest and details may change, said Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based agency. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon this month appointed health crisis expert David Nabarro to coordinate the UN response.

Previous outbreaks pale in significance...

and it is getting worse very fast...

Charts: Bloomberg, WHO, and Ecologically Oriented

* * *

And it gets worse - WHO shuts Sierra Leone Lab...

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday it had shut a laboratory in Sierra Leone after a health worker there was infected with Ebola, a move that may hamper efforts to boost the global response to the worst ever outbreak of the disease

The WHO said it had withdrawn staff from the laboratory testing for Ebola at Kailahun -- one of only two in Sierra Leone -- after a Senegalese epidemiologist was infected with Ebola.

"It's a temporary measure to take care of the welfare of our remaining workers," WHO spokesperson Christy Feig said, without specifying how long the measure would last. "After our assessment, they will return."

And another WHO health worker is sick (and being flown home to Hamburg)

An employee of the World Health Organization (WHO) who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone will be flown to the German city of Hamburg for treatment, a spokesman for the city said.

Rico Schmidt, spokesman for the Hamburg Health Senate, said the patient would arrive later on Wednesday and be treated at Hamburg university clinic's tropical medicine institute. The WHO in Geneva said the patient was a Senegalese epidemiologist.

One of the deadliest diseases known to man, Ebola is transmitted by contact with body fluids and the current outbreak has killed at least 120 healthcare workers.

  *  *

We leave it to the WHO to conclude:

It’s not “a
question of incompetence or complacency,” according to Morrison, who
said the WHO should be able to raise the money needed.“It’s the fact we’re catching up with the unknown, and it’s way ahead of us.”

Credit to Zero Hedge 

Satanic "Black Mass" September 21 Oklahoma City Civic Center

Alarming 16% of French Residents Support Islamic State

The poll, conducted by ICM Research for the Russian news agency Rossiya Segodnya, has indicated that the number of Europeans "supporting" the Islamic State (IS) is alarmingly high; especially among French respondents.

ICM interviewed 3,007 respondents in three out of the four largest countries in the European Union: Britain (1,000), France (1,006) and Germany (1,001). The survey found that a significant number of respondents had a positive attitude toward IS in the UK (7 percent) and Germany (4 percent), and that the number of French citizens supporting the extremist movement has reached 16 percent.

"The poll of European attitudes towards the group, carried out by ICM for Russian news agency Rossiya Segodnya, revealed that 16 percent of French citizens have a positive opinion of IS. This percentage increases among younger respondents, spiking at 27 percent for those aged 18-24," Newsweek magazine reports.

Anne-Elizabeth Moutet, Newsweek's France correspondent, said that she was "unsurprised by the news."

"This is the ideology of young French Muslims from immigrant backgrounds, unemployed to the tune of 40 percent, who've been deluged by satellite TV and internet propaganda," she underscored, as cited by Newsweek.

The American media outlet points out that there are five million Muslims living in France, "largely of North African descent," who arrived in France after leaving its former North African colonies in 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

"This is not a result of sympathy of a significant number of French people for this extremist terrorist organization. This is simply a manifestation of the country’s accumulated potential rejection of the existing system as a whole. This is a form of rejection of the elites, a form of protest," stressed Yury Rubinsky, the head of the Center for French Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was quoted as saying by RT.

However, as Vox has noted, a growing number of Muslims in Europe "are not just expressing their support for IS in polls": they are actively joining the jihadi movement in Syria and Iraq.

Experts claim that about 2,000 volunteers from Europe are now fighting for the Islamic State in the Middle East. According to France's Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, "today there are nearly 900 from France who are part of this phenomenon [IS]," the Associated Press reported in mid-August. At the same time, Newsweek reported that "at least 1,500 young British Muslims have been recruited by extremists fighting in Iraq and Syria" during the last three years, citing Khalid Mahmood, a British MP.

Credit to RIA Novosti