Total Control: New Measures Toward Global Totalitarianism

For those who have read “1984” by George Orwell, it is almost prophetic in its depth and accuracy. The reason that the warning has not been heeded is that change takes place with glacial slowness. Sometimes the changes take so long they dull the senses and we become inured to “more bad news,” or we just discount it continually. No matter what our reaction, the march toward global totalitarianism proceeds, with or without our consent or even our attention.

The slow march is deliberate. The reason for this is simple. The generation/group of people between the ages of approximately 40 to 60 are of an age who still have a sense of nationalism and grew up/experienced their formative years without that complete socialist indoctrination inflicted upon the youth of today. For the youth, there is no escape from it on their own, because they have no point of reference with which to identify and compare it to what has been forced upon them now by indoctrinators (termed “educators”). The new “all for the communal hive” mentality has been crafted by those in power and carried out by teachers.

So, a deliberate and systematic “ratcheting” up and down of the speed Wcof changes (the institution of new totalitarian controls) varies. Those in power need to eliminate those between 40 to 60 years old, or “engulf” them by numbers of the new manipulated youth and then just “vote” them out of effectiveness. The “Tyranny of the Majority” perfected to an art form. Obama couldn’t finish the job in 8 years…but the sporadic ratcheting just took a new twist.

It was reported that Bill Gates is joining a group of investors for an initial investment of about $1 billion dollars. They are going to back a company based in Seattle, WA called EarthNow that will endeavor to emplace 500 satellites above the Earth. 

When the emplacement is complete, every inch of the globe will be able to be surveilled in real time. 

The Daily Mail wrote a good piece on it on 4/19/18 that seemed to run unnoticed. A few other networks picked it up and reported on it, with the most summarized version being a piece entitled “Surveillance of Entire Earth, Big Brother Satellite Army,” by Battle For World.

EarthNow will provide this complete surveillance to “high value enterprise and government customers,” in other words: Mega-Corporations and Government.

There’s more afoot. The article, “Compulsory Biometric ID Announced by European Commission,” by Virginia Hale came out on 4/17/18. Here’s an excerpt:

“The European Commission has announced plans to make biometric ID cards compulsory across the bloc which will allow authorities to bar “terrorists and criminals” from accessing money and other services. Plans to introduce mandatory ID cards across all 28 EU member states — including Britain — have been in development for more than two years in Brussels as part of the Commission’s goal of building an effective “security union”, Die Welt reports.

Set to be equipped with data including the holder’s fingerprint, the cards would be designed to tackle identity fraud and make it harder to falsify documents, according to Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos.  “We have to tighten the screws until there is no room left for terrorists or criminals and no more means for them to carry out attacks,” he told the German newspaper on Monday.  “This means that they must be barred from accessing money, counterfeit documents, weapons and explosives, and at the same time prevented from being able to cross our borders undetected.”

Tightening the screws, eh? But none of those measures will restrict the true criminals…the “partners” of national governments…who access money, counterfeit documents, weapons, and explosive…they do the same things they claim to be “preventing.” All in the “interests of public safety,” and all under the Color of Law, at the expense of the citizen-beeves.

Think this isn’t coming here, to the United States? Think again. The biggie that they want now is the DNA. If you recall, I wrote a piece last Fall that mentioned how the Baltimore Ravens Football Administration tried to give out “free DNA kits” on opening day to fans. It was stopped in the “interests of public health” where the fans would have swabbed their mouths and dropped it in a vial…all to “find out their ancestry,” etc. Not quite. They wanted to see if people would voluntarily give away their DNA.

Myriad Genetics (the “inventors” of the Brica system of breast cancer detection) tried to patent genes they collected, and the courts struck it down. Little by little, the paradigm shifts, however, and recently you’ve been hearing some “murmurs” about DNA information for both ID cards (Driver’s Licenses, for now) and to obtain a firearm…as it is mandatory in some states already to submit biometric information prior to purchasing a pistol or rifle.

On 4/12/18, an article came out entitled “Estonia offers free genetic testing in nationwide experiment,” by Jari Tanner of AP, and here’s an excerpt:

“Estonia has started offering residents free genetic profiling in a nationwide experiment aimed at minimizing risks for typical diseases and encouraging a healthier lifestyle through personalized data reports.  Lili Milani, a researcher with the Estonian Genome Center at the University of Tartu, said Thursday the scheme kicked off in March and will initially cover some 100,000 volunteers in the Baltic country of 1.3 million. Participants are required to donate DNA samples from blood and give consent to storing their data to the Estonian Biobank, which has collected health records and biological samples from Estonians since 2000.”

Do you like that one? “Required” and “give consent” for storing their data, as if it’s a service. The Estonians have been giving samples to a biobank that has been actively collecting physical samples for the past 18 years.

This is to obtain a DNA “fingerprint” from everyone. It is a worldwide collection activity taking place right under our noses and before our eyes.

As you can see, they’re pushing their “family-friendly” activities more and more…using the “voluntary” trick at first…but eventually it will become mandatory. It already happens in the U.S. When you have a surgical procedure or operation they take tissue and blood samples and save them in a repository, ostensibly to “compare with later tests,” etc., etc. The samples are frozen and kept by labs who have genetic repositories, such as Myriad Genetics.

So, Bill Gates and his allies are going to emplace a global surveillance system of satellites, biometric IDs are being pushed and finalized for all of Europe, and genetics collection facilities are in “overdrive” worldwide. See the writing on the wall and don’t ignore it. They are moving toward global governance in every nation. Orwell is no longer alive, but his writings were a warning for all of mankind that we would all do well to heed before it’s too late.

Putin Warns "Russia Has Right To Respond" To US Military Buildup, Hints At Use Of Nuclear Weapons

Multiple Russian state media outlets are reporting that President Vladimir Putin has stressed that Russia has a right to respond to US military build-up in Europe while furthering its strategic nuclear deterrence capabilities in a speech delivered before a Defense Ministry meeting on Friday in the city of Balashikha outside of Moscow.

At the same meeting Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that NATO has doubled the number of its military drills since 2012 in the vicinity of Russia"s borders, noting that Russia is carefully monitoring what it considers hostile NATO build-up and intensified surveillance operations along Russian borders. The defense minister further indicated that the number of NATO-member country troops stationed near Russian borders has tripled, growing from 10 to 40 thousand in three years, saying "In the Baltic states and Poland, four battalion-tactical groups, an armored brigade of the US Army, headquarters of NATO multinational divisions in Poland and Romania are deployed."

Russian solider during the September "Zapad" (West) war games. Image source: Getty

Since the crisis in Ukraine (which began in 2014) and Russia"s subsequent annexation of the Crimea, an Obama administration policy of steady build-up and periodic war games has been in place in East European and the Baltic countries, including Bulgaria, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. A little under a year ago a Reuters report acknowledged that NATO has been "expanding its presence in the region to levels unprecedented since the Cold War" - something which the Pentagon has long touted as defensive in nature.

And just this week news broke that after months of indecision over whether or not to move forward with Obama-era legislation which initially paved the way for legalizing US arms sales to Ukraine, Trump has approved the first ever US commercial sale of weapons to the Kiev government, which Moscow sees as an illegitimate puppet regime supported by the West. According to The Washington Post, "administration officials confirmed that the State Department this month approved a commercial license authorizing the export of Model M107A1 Sniper Systems, ammunition, and associated parts and accessories to Ukraine, a sale valued at $41.5 million. These weapons address a specific vulnerability of Ukrainian forces fighting a Russian-backed separatist movement in two eastern provinces."

Meanwhile, it is likely that Putin"s words are to some extent a calculated response to news of the unexpected approval of US arms exports to Ukraine, which was reported on Wednesday. Putin characterized Washington"s new national security strategy as "aggressive" and "definitely offensive" according to Russia"s TASS news agency.

Putin said that both the US and NATO have been "accelerating build-up of infrastructure in Europe" in violation of the 1987 treaty on the elimination of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles. He said concerning the new and expanding US missile defense system now based in Poland that they are not merely defensive in nature but offensive weapons: "The point is, and specialists know about it very well, those launchers are all-purpose. They can also be used with existing sea-launched cruise missiles with the flight range of up to 2,500 km [1,550 miles]. And in this case, these missiles are no longer sea-launched missiles, they can be easily moved to land," Putin said.

He added further that Russia"s Defense Ministry "should take into account" Western military strategies and that "Russia has a sovereign right and all possibilities to adequately and in due time react to such potential threats."

And notably concerning Putin"s reference to nuclear weapons and infrastructure, TASS summarizes the following:

There are efforts to disrupt strategic parity through deployment of global anti-missile defense system and other strike systems "equatable to nuclear weapons," the Russian leader told military officials. At the moment, Russia"s strategic nuclear forces are a reliable deterrent to such a military build-up, he added. However, it is necessary to develop them further, Putin said. "I"m talking about missile systems fit to steadily counter not only existing, but also future ABMs."

This comes as earlier this week another spine-chilling scare story involving the Russians and Putin"s plan for supposed global domination spread widely in Western media after two major European tabloids published sensational headlines on Wednesday claiming that, according to the UK"s largest tabloid The Sun, Russia secretly practiced full-scale invasion of Europe with bombing raids on Germany during Russia"s September "Zapad" (West) military drills. 

Graphic purporting to show Russia"s September pre-planned "Zapad" military drills. The UK Sun tabloid published it along with the following scaremongering and false headline: "Russia secretly practised full-scale invasion of Europe with bombing raids on Germany during Vladimir Putin’s military drills."

However, analysis of the Russian military games produced by Chatham House (essentially the UK version of The Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR) admitted that the exercise was "small, managed, and contained" while being defensive in nature as "a dress rehearsal for defending against a NATO intervention" and meant to send a message to the West, saying "This is what Russia wants the West to believe is the Kremlin’s understanding of what a conventional war between Russia and NATO forces would look like."

The Chatham House analysis further commented that the West"s previous "scaremongering" over the periodic military games (and lately revived this week in the media) is actually affirming the Russian perspective - that NATO-driven threat inflation and scare tactics are really what"s driving current tensions and build-up between the two sides.

According to Chatham House:

Western commentators were obsessed with the numbers of Russian troops being mobilized during the course of exercise and stuck firmly to the "100,000 servicemen" narrative. But Russia proved them wrong by keeping the drills small, managed, and contained.

 

The Kremlin could therefore credibly claim that the West overreacted and fell victim to scaremongering and reporting rumors that Moscow was not being transparent about the nature of the exercise and its intentions.

Considering that Chatham House is at the heart of the UK"s political and defense establishment, this is a remarkably candid admission from a source that"s usually hawkish on the perceived Russian threat of anti-NATO military expansion. 

But perhaps as US and NATO military bases have increasingly encroached on Russia"s borders over the last two decades, it is finally becoming obvious and undeniable even to the most establishment of Western pundits that Putin has a reason to build up Russian defenses in equal measure.

New York City Processed a Fake Property Deed. THIS Innovative Country Won’t Have that Problem.

Via The Daily Bell

Imagine having the power to declare something legitimate with the stroke of a pen, the press of a stamp, or the enter button on your keyboard.

The government has that power. But it is part of the magical myth of government legitimacy. That is the main service government provides: legitimacy.

It can make stealing legitimate. It can make kidnapping legitimate. It can make assassinations, genocides, and wars legitimate.

And the government can also make housing deeds legitimate. They do the official processing to make sure that everything is in order. In their sacred temple of city hall, they bless the official papers with holy stamps, and all is right.

Except when it’s not.

New York City approved fraudulent papers which allowed a man to “officially” steal a woman’s house.

The forged deed was homemade, but the city government still processed it. They said stopping the fake deed from being processed would have been like finding a needle in a haystack. It sounds pretty easy to steal someone’s property with forged documents using the government’s system of verification.

After years of effort, the woman, Jennifer Merin, was finally able to hold the man accountable. He is now serving a year in prison.

But holding the city accountable is another story.

Merin, 74, had sued the city for not catching the forgery when the paperwork was first filed, but lost on appeal when the court backed a judge who said she couldn’t prove the city was negligent.

The feisty homeowner is fuming and has vowed to fight the decision.

“I find it absolutely astonishing and sickening that the city that gave away my property without due process by registering an obviously fraudulent deed, while it was still charging me for taxes on that property and water usage on that property, is now insisting that it has no accountability for those actions,” Merin told the Daily News.

Big governments are a lot like big corporations in some ways. They are dinosaurs. They can not maneuver and change with the times. In business, these megacorporations usually end up being upset by small startups with innovative business models.

And the same could happen with government.

The country of Georgia has less than half the population of New York City. Much like Estonia, and other small countries, Georgia is embracing technology and innovation in its governing structure.

This year, Georgia became the first country to use the blockchain for property transactions.

In April last year, the government and bitcoin hardware and software firm Bitfury Grouplaunched a project to register land titles via a private blockchain, which is a tamper-proof ledger, and then to make those transactions verifiable using bitcoin’s blockchain, which is public…

In a blockchain-based ledger, records are time-stamped, as are subsequent changes to those records. This would allow people interested in a specific property to see and verify the date of past transactions.

Additionally, data on blockchains can be made private or public. In this case, the details of the real estate transactions are placed on a private blockchain network run by known computers, and then, in order for citizens to verify the authenticity of certificates, that data can be turned into a cryptographic “hash” that’s made public on the bitcoin blockchain which is run by thousands of computers worldwide. The hash is a type of digital fingerprint that enables anyone to verify that the data matches what’s on the blockchain without seeing the data itself.

Finally, blockchain technology brings security to real estate transactions because there’s no central point of failure. The ledger is distributed among many computers, so a would-be hacker would need to simultaneously attack at least 51% of the network in order to fraudulently alter records.

Whether or not you believe Bitcoin is a real currency or a big bubble, the underlying technology is legitimate.

The blockchain is legitimate because it hosts independently verifiable information. It is legitimate because it cannot be tampered with, and holds a permanent record of transactions. It is legitimate because it is decentralized, and can be used by individuals without trusting in government competence.

Blockchain legitimacy has nothing to do with the myth of magical government action. And that is why its future is bright.

Gold Fund: Bitcoin Will Make Gold "Global Money" Again

The manager of Old Mutual Gold & Silver Fund, a precious metals fund with over $220 mln under control has said Bitcoin is “paving the way” for a global gold comeback.

Speaking to Bloomberg in an interview published today, Ned Naylor-Leyland said that the marriage of Bitcoin and gold was essentially a logical one given the characteristics and remit of both.

“Bitcoin was explicitly designed to be digital gold,” he said.

 

“So if you’re going to have a small proportion of a fund in Bitcoin, it should be in a gold fund because that’s exactly the point.”

As CoinTelegraph"s William Suberg notes, the fund, which began in April this year, is aiming to allocate up to five percent to cryptocurrency, creaming off profits from price upticks to reinvest back into gold and silver.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

Naylor-Leyland is highly bullish on the concept going forward, echoing CME Group’s Chairman Emeritus Leo Melamed in his desire to bring discipline to the scene for investors.

“It’s about bringing the ownership of disciplined money into the modern world,” he continued.

 

“Bitcoin is paving the way for the reintroduction of gold as global money.”

As we previously discussed, the real importance of bitcoin is not making cheap, easy payments. It’s not a way of making fast payments. It’s not going to allow for microtransactions or all these other use cases that we’ve heard are important for bitcoin.

The most important thing that bitcoin offers is a new form of sound money outside the control of any authority or government in the world. And that is something very, very important for the world economy. Bitcoin is hard money as opposed to easy money.

Easy money refers to money whose quantity is easy to increase, in case there is an increase in demand for it. So if people move toward using copper as money, it is very easy for copper miners to increase the supply and bring the price back down, which will hurt the people who used copper as the store of value for their savings. So copper is bad as a store of value, because it’s easy to produce in response to an increase in demand.

Gold, on the other hand, is hard money because even if the price of gold goes up a lot, it is very hard for gold miners to increase the supply of gold in the world. It is hard to bring the value down. Therefore, gold serves as a good store of value in the long run. It’s a much better store of value than other forms of money over time.

Bitcoin is far closer to gold. It is a digital equivalent of gold.

Bitcoin’s supply is strictly limited. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins. And the code that controls the issuing of the bitcoins is decentralized among thousands, tens of thousands of nodes that operate the bitcoin software. And if it were to change, it would need the majority agreement of everybody involved.

Since everybody involved has an interest in maintaining the monetary policy in a way that maintains the value of the money, it is highly unlikely that we’re going to witness any change in the monetary policy. Even technical changes, like changing the block size or various parameters, have been almost impossible to make in bitcoin.

It’s possible to make a copy of bitcoin, but it’s not possible to change bitcoin. There will always be some people that want to stick to the inflation schedule as it is. So the monetary policy of bitcoin is immutable, it isn’t going to change, and since the supply is strictly limited and the network is distributed and nobody can control it, we might just have the digital equivalent of gold.

This, I think, is an enormously important innovation, because it has many good properties that gold doesn’t have. It’s very easy to send across the world very quickly, and it’s much harder to confiscate than gold. Therefore, the possibilities are exciting for people who believe in the importance of sound money for society.

Look at the era of the classical gold standard, from 1871, the end of the Franco–Prussian War, until the beginning of World War I. There’s a reason why this is known as the Golden Era, the Gilded Age, and La Belle Epoque. It was a time of unrivaled human flourishing all over the world. Economic growth was everywhere. Technology was being spread all over the world. Peace and prosperity were increasing everywhere around the world. Technological innovations were advancing.

I think this is no coincidence. What the gold standard allowed people to do is to have a store of value that would maintain its value in the future. And that gave people a low time preference, that gave people the incentive to think of the long term, and that made people want to invest in things that would pay off over the long term.

With bitcoin, once you’ve started holding some bitcoin and you see it appreciate, you start understanding that there is a very high opportunity cost to spending, and you start thinking twice about spending frivolously.

Also, bitcoin matters for moving very large quantities and high amounts of value, particularly in transactions in which you’re trying to avoid censorship or economic inflation from the central bank. So as a store of value, this is what bitcoin’s importance is.

*  *  *

Not everyone in the wider gold industry is as happy with the status quo, however.

Discussing a drop in profits, BullionVault Research Director Adrian Ash said earlier this month that Bitcoin “noise” was “distracting” some investors and leading to gold being sidelined.

As John Rubino previously noted, sound money advocates who love the concept of cryptocurrencies but don’t want to abandon precious metals have been trying to clarify their thoughts of late.

Risk Hedge just helped, with a comprehensive statement of the pro-gold position.

The following is an excerpt. Read the full article here.

All the Reasons Cryptocurrencies Will Never Replace Gold as Your Financial Hedge

Despite what the crypto-evangelists will tell you, digital tokens will never and can never replace gold as your financial hedge.

 

Here are six reasons why.

 

#1: Cryptocurrencies Are More Similar to a Fiat Money System Than You Think.
The definition of “fiat money” is a currency that is legal tender but not backed by a physical commodity.

 

It’s clear that cryptocurrencies partially fit the definition of fiat money. They may not be legal tender yet, but they’re also not backed by any sort of physical commodity. And while total supply is artificially constrained, that constraint is just… well, artificial.

 

You can’t compare that to the physical constraint on gold’s supply.

 

Some countries are also exploring the idea of introducing government-backed cryptocurrencies, which would take them one step closer toward fiat-currency status.

 

As Russia, India, and Estonia are considering their own digital money, Dubai has already taken it one step further. In September, the kingdom announced that it has signed a deal to launch its own blockchain-based currency known as emCash.

 

So ask yourself, how can you effectively hedge against a fiat money system with another type of fiat money?

 

#2: Gold Has Always Had and Will Always Have an Accessible Liquid Market.
An asset is only valuable if other people are willing to trade it in return for goods, services, or other assets.

 

Gold is one of the most liquid assets in existence. You can convert it into cash on the spot, and its value is not bound by national borders. Gold is gold—anywhere you travel in the world, you can exchange gold for whatever the local currency is.

 

The same cannot be said about cryptocurrencies. While they’re being accepted in more and more places, broad, mainstream acceptance is still a long way off.

 

What makes gold so liquid is the immense size of its market. The larger the market for an asset, the more liquid it is. According to the World Gold Council, the total value of all gold ever mined is about $7.8 trillion.

 

By comparison, the total size of the cryptocurrency market stands at about $161 billion as of this writing—and that market cap is split among 1,170 different cryptocurrencies.

 

That’s a long shot from becoming as liquid and widely accepted as gold.

 

#3: The Majority of Cryptocurrencies Will Be Wiped Out.
Many Wall Street veterans compare the current rise of cryptocurrencies to the Internet in the early 1990s.

 

Most stocks that had risen in the first wave of the Internet craze were wiped out after the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000. The crash, in turn, gave rise to more sustainable Internet companies like Google and Amazon, which thrive to this day.

 

The same will probably happen with cryptocurrencies. Most of them will get wiped out in the first serious correction. Only a few will become the standard, and nobody knows which ones at this point.

 

And if major countries like the US jump in and create their own digital currency, they will likely make competing “private” currencies illegal. This is no different from how privately issued banknotes are illegal (although they were legal during the Free Banking Era of 1837–1863).

 

So while it’s likely that cryptocurrencies will still be around years from now, the question is, which ones? There is no need for such guesswork when it comes to gold.

 

#4: Lack of Security Undermines Cryptocurrencies’ Effectiveness.
Security is a major drawback facing the cryptocurrency community. It seems that every other month, there is some news of a major hack involving a Bitcoin exchange.

 

In the past few months, the relatively new cryptocurrency Ether has been a target for hackers. The combined total amount stolen has almost reached $82 million.

 

Bitcoin, of course, has been the largest target. Based on current prices, just one robbery that took place in 2011 resulted in the hackers taking hold of over $3.7 billion worth of bitcoin—a staggering figure. With security issues surrounding cryptocurrencies still not fully rectified, their capability as an effective hedge is compromised.

 

When was the last time you heard of a gold depository being robbed? Not to mention the fact that most depositories have full insurance coverage.

The gold vs bitcoin debate has a long way to run. But if the outcome is a world in which money is what the market - rather than the government - says it is, then hopefully there will be room for both.

US, Sweden, Finland Launch New Format Talks: Dancing To Washington"s Tune

Authored by Peter Korzun via The Stratgeic Culture Foundation,

US Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Helsinki on Nov. 6-7 to attend a meeting of the Northern Group, a multilateral forum of 12 countries: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Before the event, the secretary was received by Finnish President Sauli Niinistö and then met his counterparts from Sweden and Finland. This is the first time a US Defense Secretary held talks in this format. Looks like the tripartite format talks are going to become a regular event as a similar meeting was announced to be planned for 2018.

Finnish Defense Minister Jussi Niinistö explained that the goal of this format was meant to supplement, rather than replace, Finnish and Swedish bilateral relations with Washington. According to him, no new alliance is being built despite the expanded military cooperation with the United States. The minister also invited the US military to participate in large-scale military drills in 2020 or 2021. According to him, Finland started preparations for a major military exercise of a scale it had not arranged since the end of the Cold War. “If there’s a crisis, it will be good for us to practice receiving help,” Jussi Niinistö said. Formally a neutral country, Finland is offering a scenario which envisages receiving US-led NATO reinforcements, like if it were a full-fledged member of the North Atlantic Alliance to be defended in accordance with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty!

Erkki Tuomioja, a former foreign minister and member of the Social Democrat Party, said he believes the defense minister is skirting parliamentary procedures in pushing to host such a large exercise and that he intends to oppose the drills.

A poll published on Nov.5 suggested 59 percent of Finns are opposed to NATO membership. Only 22 percent support the idea. Finland is to hold presidential election on January 28, 2018. None of the current presidential candidates support NATO membership except for Nils Torvalds of the Swedish People"s Party, who is polling a meager 1 percent. Sauli Niinistö, the incumbent who enjoys 76 percent support ahead of the election, has pushed to keep the prospect of NATO membership open to be backed by a majority of Finns, possibly via a referendum. But Finnish Defense Minister Jussi Niinistö keeps on stubbornly pushing his country into NATO’s arms without taking political reality into consideration.

He also said that cooperation to combat hybrid warfare was a priority item on the agenda. The term hybrid warfare is used in the West to label Russia. The Helsinki-based hybrid threat center - the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats - commenced its operation on Oct.4. 11 European governments plus the United States have joined forces to build it. Similar centers exist in other countries but this one is the first to link NATO with the auspices of the EU. Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said the center is a sign that the two organizations are cooperating at “an unprecedented level,” as evidenced by Finland, an EU country that is not a NATO member, being the host.

Swedish Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist, a tripartite talks participant, sent a very important security policy message. Following the meeting with Mattis, the Swedish defense chief informed the parliamentary defense committee that the government had chosen the US missile system Patriot as a replacement for the current outdated defense Robot System 97. The idea is to equip Sweden"s two air defense battalions with Patriot missiles until 2025. Sweden — Finland’s closest military ally and another non-NATO member — remilitarized the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea for the first time since the end of the Cold War and reintroduced conscription, among other things, to gradually move the country to war footing.

Some US-NATO deployments take place in the region for the first time ever. For instance, Baltops-2016 was the first NATO exercise to be held on Finnish territory. In September, US military made their first appearance on Swedish soil during the Aurora 17 military drills, the country"s largest training event in decades. Norway, a NATO member, welcomed an extended deployment of US Marines in June. It"s the first time a foreign force had been posted on Norwegian soil since World War II. Thus, Norway has actually shifted from the “no foreign forces on national soil” true-and-tried policy with political implications to follow. The Marines also have large stockpiles of tanks, artillery and other weaponry, which fill a network of caves. The equipment can accommodate roughly 14,000 troops, or a full Marine Expeditionary Brigade.

In June, Sweden and Finland joined the United Kingdom-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) - a rapidly deployable unit capable of conducting the full spectrum of NATO operations.

The countries of Northern Europe, including non-NATO Sweden and Finland, support the Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, to pull together at least 20 EU countries in jointly planning, developing and coordinating weapons and equipment for military. The initiative is complementary to the operations of NATO. According to the Financial Times, more than half the EU’s member states are expected to sign up within days to a landmark joint defence effort at a meeting of European foreign and defence ministers on November 13 and launch the project in December.

The militarization of Northern Europe rarely hits headlines, but a look at the facts shows the trend is gaining momentum. It does not go unnoticed in Russia, prompting it to take appropriate measures. The recent Zapad exercise is an example. There is little wonder that Russia is concerned about the growing US influence in Northern Europe. After all, Russia belongs to the region, while the United States has no territorial or any other justification for its military presence there.

There will be a reaction if Sweden or Finland joins the North Atlantic Alliance. Even without formal membership, there is very little space between "being in NATO" and "being outside the alliance.” Evidently, no such thing as military neutrality on the Scandinavian Peninsula exists anymore to make the abovementioned countries priority targets for Russian response in case a military conflict sparks. Russia did not start it but it has to react as the countries of the region appear to abandon traditional good neighbor policies in favor of dancing to US tune.

Greece Plans 30 Billion Euro Debt Swap As It Prepares For The End Of Bailouts

Greece is planning a 30 billion euros debt swap which will convert 20 existing bonds into 5 (or less) new issues in the next few weeks (although the exact timing remains uncertain). The bonds are expected to have similar maturities to the existing notes from 2023-2042.

According to Bloomberg, the Greek government is planning an unprecedented debt swap worth 29.7 billion euros ($34.5 billion) aimed at boosting the liquidity of its paper and easing the sale of new bonds in the future. Under a project that could be launched in mid-November, the government plans to swap 20 bonds issued after a restructuring of Greek debt held by private investors in 2012 with as many as five new fixed-coupon bonds, according to two senior bankers with knowledge of the swap plan. The bank officials requested anonymity as the plan has yet to be made public.

Markets have responded well to the news as Bloomberg reported.

• Greek 10-Year Yield Drops to Lowest Since July on Debt-Swap Plan

• Greek 5-yr bond yield drops by 10bps to 4.345%, its lowest level since the nation issued the new note in July.


• Demand spurred by optimism that the third bailout review will be completed in time; news that government is planning a debt-swap plan is also boosting sentiment

While we struggle to believe that the Greek debt crisis is anywhere near close to being solved, at least the country seems to have been touched by Europe’s recovery.

Furthermore, the European Council announced on 25 September 2017 that Greece’s finances have stabilised and it was closing the excessive debt procedure. It sounded good anyway...

"After many years of severe difficulties, Greece"s finances are in much better shape. Today"s decision is therefore welcome", said Toomas Tõniste, minister for finance of Estonia, which currently holds the Council presidency.

 

"We are now in the last year of the financial support programme, and progress is being made to enable Greece to again raise money on the financial markets at sustainable rates." 

 

From a deficit of 15.1% of GDP reached in 2009, Greece"s fiscal balance has steadily improved, turning into a 0.7% of GDP surplus in 2016. Although a small deficit is projected for 2017, the fiscal outlook is expected to improve again thereafter…In the light of this, the Council found that Greece fulfils the conditions for closing the excessive deficit procedure. Greece will now be subject to the preventive arm of the EU"s fiscal rulebook, the Stability and Growth Pact. Monitoring will continue until August 2018 under its macroeconomic adjustment programme.

Meanwhile, the planned debt swap is a step in the Greek government’s preparations for August 2018 when, excuse our cynicism, Greece will essentially look to borrow more money to buffer its debt mountain. Bloomberg comments. 

“The move aims to address the current illiquidity of the Greek bond market,” according to analysts at Pantelakis Securities SA in Athens.

 

It will also “establish a decent yield curve, thus facilitating the country’s return to public debt markets.”

 

The move comes as Greece prepares for life after the end of its current bailout program in August 2018. The debt swap is a step toward the country’s full return to markets required to avoid a new bailout program. The government plans to tap the bond market in 2018 to raise at least 6 billion euros to create an adequate buffer to honor debt obligations, according to a government official…

 

Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos said in October that tapping markets soon wouldn’t be aimed at getting fresh money so much as to better manage the country’s debt and make its bonds more attractive. The new bonds, following the swap, are expected to have the same value as the old ones and will have a fixed coupon, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said.

Talking of cynicism, Goldman Sachs role in this transaction remains uncertain.

The challenge for Greece is to be in a sufficiently strong financial position to refinance more than 17 billion euros of debt in 2019 as Bloomberg explains, Greece returned to markets in July for the first time since 2014, raising 3 billion euros through new 5-year bonds. Now, with the swap plan, the government wants to ensure it can tap the market for enough funds to refinance its debt obligations in 2019, which originally amounted to 19 billion euros. The government managed to reduce this number by 1.6 billion euros with the July bond issuance.

While the timing of the debt swap transaction is uncertain, the government is aiming to complete it in time for the return of representatives of the country’s creditors in the last week of this month. No doubt they will be overjoyed by what they find.

There"s just one thing...

Bitcoin Just Spiked Back Above $6000 As Catalan Considers Blockchain-Backed e-Residency Program

It"s 9am in San Francisco (and 5pm in Barcelona), so it"s time to panic-buy some crypto-currency...

Bitcoin just surged over $200, back over $6000.

And Ethereum is back above $300...

For now the catalyst is unclear. However, amid increasing tensions folowing Spain"s impositin of Article 155, as CryptoCoinsNews.com reports, Catalonia, which is fighting for independence from Spain, is considering an e-residency program similar to the one in Estonia. Catalonia is also considering adopting its own digital token or cryptocurrency.

The Government of Catalonia, the Generalitat de Catalunya, has sent representatives to Estonia to learn about the e-residency program, which offers a government-issued digital identity card that provides a way to operate a location-independent business online.

Dani Marco, the director of SmartCatalonia, an official Catalan agency, said the Estonians built a model of economic development from scratch. Marco appears to be heading Catalonia’s e-residency initiative.

Catalonia continues to move forward with plans to create an economy separate from Spain, according to El Pais, Spain’s leading newspaper. Estonia’s e-residency program serves as Catalonia’s model and could emulate an Estonian proposal to issue national blockchain based tokens.

E-Residency Benefits

El Pais reported that Catalonia is interested in Estonia’s e-residency program since the program has no borders. The e-residency program has attracted more than 20,000 entrepreneurs from 143 countries since 2014, including 336 from Spain.

El Pais further reported that Catalonia has the largest number of entrepreneurs and those working with virtual currencies in Spain.

Vitalik Buterin Weighs In

Blockchain experts in Catalonia have sought help from Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s founder, according to El Pais. Vitalik advised the Catalonians to create an ICO to offer a currency that would work in tandem with the financing of a business project for the virtual residence program. The e-residency ecosystem could create an economic community independent of a central bank.

Estonia recently proposed “Estcoin,” a national cryptocurrency. If the country follows through on this plan, it would be the first national government to launch an ICO.

Kaspar Korjus, managing director for Estonia’s e-residency program, posted a Medium blog in August claiming Estonia could offer Estcoins to residents. The coins could be managed by the Republic of Estonia, but accessed by anyone through the e-residency program. The program would launch an ICO to offer the coins.

Korjus also said the ability to start a location independent company is the main factor driving the growth of the e-residency program.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

As CoinTelegraph reports, while the Blockchain residency program would be the first of its kind in Europe, perhaps the bigger news is that an independent Catalan government would likely not have a central bank, choosing a national cryptocurrency instead. With Russian and Kazakhstan already suggesting national cryptocurrencies, the move would not come as a huge surprise.

NATO "Concerned By Russia's Military Buildup Close To Our Borders"

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The Secretary-General of NATO said this on October 9th, speaking in NATO member Romania, right across the Black Sea from Russia’s region of Crimea (which had always been part of Russia except for the brief period 1954-2014, when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 — i.e., the Soviet dictator had made Crimea ‘Ukrainian’, and only in 2014 was a plebiscite actually held there in order to determine what the people there wanted, and more than 90% chose to be restored to the Russian Government). He said, on October 9th, that NATO is “concerned by Russia’s military buildup close to our borders”, but NATO actually had expanded up to Russia’s borders; in no way had Russia expanded up to NATO’s borders. NATO’s leader was importantly misrepresenting history, there.

In fact, Romania, itself, used to be a member of the former Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact military alliance of nations, which had been set up by the Soviet Union in response to America’s having established in 1949 its NATO military alliance with Western European nations. After the Cold War ended, on Russia’s side, in 1991, and has been secretly continued by the U.S. Government and its allies right up to the present time, Romania became a member of the NATO anti-Russian alliance in 2004, under George W. Bush’s Administration. But Bush’s father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, had, as the U.S. President, established, in 1990, the foundation for what NATO now is doing in Romania, against Russia — even though Russia had, in fact, ended the Cold War on its side, in 1991.

When the Cold War ended in 1991, it was on the basis of the promise by the Soviet Union that the U.S.S.R. would end, and would become its component separate independent states (one of which was Russia), and end its communism, and end its Warsaw Pact military alliance with nations adjoining the Soviet Union - that all of this would happen if the United States and its NATO allies would not expand NATO, and that especially NATO would not move “one inch to the east” (i.e., toward Russia) by adding, to the NATO military alliance, any of the nations (such as Romania) which had been in the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact, nor especially any nations that had been a part of the former Soviet Union itself (such as Ukraine). The U.S. Government wants to bring Ukraine into NATO, to become its 29th member-nation. But Ukraine is not yet a member, and NATO therefore doesn’t yet have any legitimate business there, at all. NATO isn’t, and can’t yet be, ‘defending’ Ukraine — no matter how much NATO might possibly want to go to war against Russia.

For NATO to be alleging to be “concerned by Russia’s military buildup close to our borders” is amazing, since NATO is militarily building up not only “close to” Russia’s borders, but right on Russia’s borders (such as in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and is now seeking to add Ukraine as a member, but already has other formerly Russia-allied nations: Poland, East Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and, this year, Montenegro - and is attempting to draw in the few remaining ones, but especially Ukraine, which it claims to be ‘defending’.

The Warsaw Pact was formed six years after the NATO alliance was, and only after repeated failures by the Soviet Union to be allowed into NATO. The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was, additionally, but only vaguely, promised, in 1990, that if the Cold War would ‘end’, then Russia, now to become an independent nation, would be considered ‘again’ for possible admission into NATO, but this vaguely presented bait turned out not to be honored in reality, once the deal was done. During the years after 1991, NATO boldly and blatantly violated the “move not one inch to the east” agreement with Gorbachev, and took on 13 new members — all of which lands had previously been either inside the Soviet Union, or else inside the Warsaw Pact — so that NATO increased from its then-existing 16 nations, to become today’s 29 nations, all of which 13 additional nations had previously been allied with Russia; and, so, NATO is now not only near Russia’s borders, such as in Romania, but right on Russia’s very borders in other nations, and the U.S. is, even now installing an anti-missile system to annihilate Russia’s retaliatory missiles in the event that the U.S. regime decides to launch a blitz first-strike nuclear attack against Russia to eliminate Russia’s retaliatory nuclear arsenals either on the ground or in the air and thus finally conquer NATO’s eternal target: Russia.

NATO repeatedly accuses Russia of aggression for defending itself against American, and other NATO, aggressions, such as U.S. President Barack Obama’s carefully engineered coup that started being planned in 2011 and was finally perpetrated in 2014 to take over Ukraine’s Government to turn anti-Russian this country, Ukraine, which has the longest of all European borders with Russia. The U.S. regime wants Ukraine in NATO, but other NATO members don’t yet allow it (and maybe never will).

However, American and other NATO ‘news’media, lie about this entire matter, and present NATO as being purely a ‘defensive’ organization, instead of what it actually is: a major component in the U.S. dictatorship’s effort ultimately to checkmate Russia or else to kill Russians entirely and take over their natural resources to be controlled by U.S. and other international corporations. NATO is an international mega-criminal gang, which enormously increases the likelihood of World War III, but which also is enormously profitable for its ultimate backers, Lockheed Martin and other NATO weapons-makers, whose controlling ownership also happens to own and control, and to advertise their other corporations’ products and services in, the ’news’ media in those nations. Media-profits are thus connected — both directly and indirectly — to that military-industrial complex, which needs invasions, even if it doesn’t actually need to conquer Russia or any other country. But perpetual war for perpetual ‘peace’ is the most essential thing of all for NATO (and, since nuclear weaponry is the most expensive type of all, the anti-Russian agenda is especiallyimportant to NATO, even without Russia’s natural resources). That’s what actually is behind NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s speech on October 9th near Russia’s border, in which he alleged, “Our deployments are a direct response to Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine,” and, “We are concerned by Russia’s military build-up close to our borders.” He said there, “We do not want to isolate Russia. NATO does not want a new Cold War. Our actions are designed to prevent, not provoke conflict.” (Even Hitler had said, prior to the start of WW II, that he was merely ‘defending’ Germany, against other countries.) He knows, as well as anyone possibly can, that, on the U.S. regime’s side, the Cold War never stopped, and that it has escalated sharply and re-invigorated NATO itself, with the Obama-regime’s takeover of Ukraine, and he knows that the ‘aggression’ which NATO and the U.S. regime blame against Russia, constitute actually Russia’s defensive actions which necessarily result from Obama’s Ukrainian coup on Russia’s very doorstep — a coup which was even documented on recordings, such as here and here (and many other key moments) (and the key background for which coup has, by now, also been documented, going all the way back to 2011, when the planning for organizing Obama’s coup was already begun in 2011 inside the U.S. State Department), and which therefore cannot even be denied (except in the persistently lying U.S.-NATO team’s ‘news’media).

It’s all a big ‘jobs program’ for the U.S. and other extremely corrupt-at-the-top nations - the U.S. aristocracy and its vassal-aristocracies in Europe and elsewhere, and their lying ‘news’media, who can’t deny the evidence, and so they simply ignore the evidence, and they instead stenographically ‘report’ the U.S. Government’s lies as ‘truths’, much the same as had happened prior to the U.S. Government’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, only on a much larger scale now.

So, these ugly facts are not reported in the NATO press, because they’re true - their truth is why they’re not allowed to be broadcast and publicly debated. Their being true is blocking those ‘democracies’ from allowing their respective publics to know anything about any of this.

We are, thus, all living in the type of situation that the allegorical novel 1984 described; but the means by which it operates, in reality, turn out to be far more sophisticated than in the fictional version.

Welcome, then, to 2017’s version of 1984 — it’s the updated version, in which, NATO is “concerned by Russia’s military buildup close to our borders.”

Russia Kicks Off "Biggest Display Of Military Power Since The Cold War"

Today, Moscow kicked off its controversial, week-long "Zapad-2017" drill, the latest iteration of a series of training maneuvers that began under the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and which has angered and put NATO and Baltic States leaders on edge. Land, sea and air units will be taking part in war games until the 21st of September across a huge area encompassing western Russia, Belarus, the Baltic Sea and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

After a long break following the collapse of communism, Zapad, or "west" in Russian, was revived in 1999 and then was expanded after Vladimir Putin became president at the end of that year. Previous versions were held in 2009 and 2013.  Moscow says fewer than 13,000 troops are participating - the threshold for inviting international observers - but NATO members believe as many as 100,000 troops will be involved in the drills. That would make this year"s drill the biggest display of Russian military power since the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago. 

Foreign observers from NATO were never allowed to watch Soviet-era Zapad exercises, and diplomats based in Moscow were barred from visiting regions where the exercises were taking place. That was supposed to change with the signing of the Vienna Document, adopted in 1990 by the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and updated in 2011, but Russia has always found ways to circumvent the agreement.

In the drill, Russia and Belarus will deploy their troops, designated as "the Northern ones" to stand up to the aggression from "the Western ones" – armed attackers from the made-up countries of Vesbaria, Lubenia, and Veishnoria. According to the scenario released by Russian and Belarusian defense officials, Vesbaria and Lubenia are located in the Baltic region and control the corridor which links the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad with Belarus.

In the real world, the corridor roughly corresponds to the border between Lithuania and Poland, both of them NATO members.  The hypothetical state of Veishnoria, however, is located in the Grodno area of Belarus, near the country"s western border. Experts cited by DW see this as a sign that Minsk and Moscow are preparing scenarios for threats originating in NATO countries as well as from within Belarus. The Grodno area seems to have a special significance as the home for a large population of Poles living in the former Soviet state. However, military officials insist that the scenario was developed "against a hypothetical opponent, unrelated to the concrete region."

What is the goal of the drill?

"Belarus and the Kaliningrad region have been infiltrated by extremist groups with the intention of committing terrorist attacks. The illegal militias are backed from abroad, providing them with armaments and naval and air capabilities. In order to neutralize the opponents, land forces will be deployed to cut off their access to sea and block air corridors in the region, with the support of the air force, air defense forces, and the navy," the official plan says.

The goal of the Zapad-2017 maneuvers is to coordinate actions between regional military commands "in the interest of ensuring military safety," Moscow and Minsk said. "The Republic of Belarus strives to prevent armed conflicts, and the Russian federation is providing it with political backing, financial aid, as well as technical and military support," according to the Belarusian Defense Ministry.

The drill is set to proceed in two stages. Initially, the military will boost their air force and air defense capabilities to protect key military and state objects, and prepare to "isolate regions of activity by the illegal armed groups and their subversive-reconnaissance squads." The second stage will be "to work out the issues of managing troops while repelling an aggression" against Russia and Belarus.

Who will take part?

Officially, the two countries say that some 12,700 servicemen will be involved in the upcoming drills. "Zapad-2017" will also involve 70 planes and helicopters, 280 tanks, 200 artillery weapons, ten ships, 200 "heavy weapons and guns" and various other pieces of military equipment. The drills will also include agents of the Russian intelligence service FSB, as well as people working for the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Emergency Situations.

However, NATO allies have repeatedly disputed these numbers, with German Defense Minister Ursula Von der Leyen claiming the real number is likely to be upwards of 100,000 troops. International accords mandate that countries provide a larger degree of transparency when holding drills with over 13,000 troops.

Last weekend, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it was "bewildered" by Von der Leyen"s assertion, and repeated its claims that drill would stay below the 13,000 threshold. Previously, the Kremlin has asked foreign defense officials and military-diplomatic corps to visit the final stage of the joint exercise at one of the sites in Russia. Belarus also stated that it had sent out invitations to UN, OSCE, NATO, the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States, and military attaches accredited in Belarus.

Despite a global anti-Russian wave that would make McCarthy blush, so-called experts don"t believe that Russia is about to launch a war, at least not yet , according to NBC.  "NATO remains calm and vigilant, and committed to keeping Estonia and all our allies safe," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said last week in Estonia, one of the tiny Baltic nations that borders Russia and often worries about undue influence from Moscow. But not everyone in the region is so sanguine. In Lithuania, another Baltic nation that was once part of the Soviet Union, Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis summed up the mood.

"We can"t be totally calm. There is a large foreign army massed next to Lithuanian territory," he told Reuters.

Other Western officials, including the head of the U.S. Army in Europe, Gen. Ben Hodges, have raised concerns that Russia might use the drills as a "Trojan horse" to make incursions into Poland and Russian-speaking regions in the Baltics. Hodges made the comment in a Reuters interview in July.

There are fears that Moscow may be moving far more troops into Belarus than it intends to withdraw, establishing a permanent military presence there on the border with NATO countries. And officials in the Baltics and Poland have voiced alarm that the exercises could be used as a cover for Russian aggression, as happened in 2014, when Moscow staged large-scale exercises to camouflage preparations to intervene on the side of pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.

NATO is also concerned: "Russia is not organizing defensive operations but instead an offensive threat, testing how serious we are about protecting the members of NATO," said Jonathan Eyal, international director of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. Belarus not only borders Russia, but also three of America"s key but relatively isolated NATO allies: Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.

"Russia is reminding us that the Baltic states are relatively indefensible," Eyal added according to NBC. "They want to see where the cracks are in NATO and where they can be widened."

Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, said he could not speculate about the real purpose of Zapad-2017, saying that this would become clear only once it was over next week. At the same time, he noted, the exercise fits a “pattern of a more assertive Russia” that is “exercising more aggressively” and, through its actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, has shown that “it is willing to use military force against its neighbors.”

In hypothetical scenarios played out by the Rand Corporation last year found that it would take Russian forces just 60 hours to reach the outskirts of the Estonian and Latvian capitals of Tallinn and Riga.

In terms of this year"s Zapad exercise, what concerns some officials and experts is they aren"t exactly sure how big they will be. There are also questions about Putin"s true intention. The last Zapad exercise, in 2013, featured "more than 75,000 men, who were engaged in simulated operations in the air, on land and at sea," according to a report by The Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based research institute. For comparison, last year 24 NATO members held a military exercise named "Anakonda," which included more than 31,000 service members.

Whatever the number, the exercises come against the backdrop of several close encounters between Russian and NATO aircraft and ships in recent years.

"There"s always a possibility for miscalculation when that"s going on," Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, NATO"s supreme allied commander, told reporters last month, referring to these near-misses. "I think that"s the importance of transparency, particularly on Russia"s part, to tell us about [the Zapad] exercise: What should we expect to see, what is the size of them, where will they operate?"

* * *

What is far less mentioned in the western press, is that are pointed out earlier, Belarus had previously invited international monitors from various foreign countries to observe the active phase of the drills.

“We are not planning to attack anyone. In terms of what the drills will be like – we’ve invited almost anyone who wants to attend. Let them come and watch,” Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko stated in September. In July, Belarusian Defense Minister Andrey Ravkov, also stressed that international organizations, including the UN, NATO, and the OSCE, as well as more than 80 foreign observers, are invited to the drills since there is “nothing to conceal.”

Finally, while the world’s attention is focused on Zapad 2017, NATO and its allies have increased their military activity on Russia"s borders.

Launching today, by odd coincidence, Sweden is holding its largest war games in over two decades, timed to start at the same time as the Russia-Belarus drills. Apart from exceeding the number of troops participating in Zapad 2017 by several thousand, the maneuvers are aimed to prepare for a possible Russian attack.

Moreover, around 40,000 NATO troops and allied forces have taken part in various military drills in Europe this summer, according to Air Force Brigadier General John Healy, who directs the drills of US forces in Europe. Eighteen NATO exercises, including Noble Partner in Georgia, occurred in the Black Sea Region alone, close to the Russian border, in summer 2017. At the same time Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria joined separate US-led Saber Guardian 2017, which took place this summer. Around 25,000 service members from 22 allied and partner nations were involved in the drills, making them the largest of the 18 Black Sea region exercises this year.  Earlier, Ukraine hosted the US-led Sea Breeze 17 naval drills, involving around 2,500 troops and more than 30 ships from 17 participating countries.

Massive Russian, NATO Wargames Set To Begin Amid Mutual Accusations Of Provocation

As the two old, cold war adversaries, Russia and NATO, prepare to begin massive war games to show off their respective military strengths, it was the UK"s turn to accuse Russia first of "testing the West" by conducting war games on NATO’s eastern flank in its biggest military exercise in four years. Speaking on BBC"s “The Andrew Marr Show” on Sunday, U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said that Russia"s exercise "is designed to provoke us, it’s designed to test our defenses, and that’s why we have to be strong. Russia is testing us and testing us now at every opportunity. We’re seeing a more aggressive Russia. We have to deal with that."

In a testament to our hyperbolic times, Fallon"s statement also contained just a "little bit" of fake news: while Fallon said that more than 100,000 Russian and Belorussian troops are at the borders of North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said last month that the so-called Zapad 2017 exercise Sept. 14-20 involves 13,000 troops, and that the drills are “purely of a defensive nature" according to Bloomberg.

Zapad 2017 preparations

To this end, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also told BBC today that Russia should allow western monitors to access the proceedings, in line with rules that require international observation of all exercises involving more than 13,000 troops. “We have seen before that Russia has used big military exercises as a disguise or a precursor for aggressive military actions against their neighbors,” Stoltenberg said. “That happened in Georgia in 2008 when they invaded Georgia, and it happened in Crimea in 2014 when they illegally annexed Crimea. So we call on Russia to be fully transparent.”

Stoltenberg also said that Russia has a history of “under-reporting” the number of troops in its exercises and “using loopholes in international agreements to avoid international observation,” although it was not clear just which country Putin had an intention of invading next.

Meanwhile, what the NATO commander forgot to mention is that just days before the dreaded Russian "Zapad 2017" exercise is set to begin, NATO"s own Steadfast Pyramid 2017 military exercise kicked off in Latvia on Sunday, with 40 senior commanders from NATO states, as well as Finland and Sweden. They are expected to train how to “plan and conduct operations” amid the bloc’s buildup in the region.

Steadfast Pyramid 2017 and Steadfast Pinnacle 2017, involving more than 40 senior officers from NATO member states, plus Finland and Sweden, will take place at the Riga-based Latvian Defense Academy, the country’s national news agency LETA reported on Sunday.

Covering the duration of Russia"s drills, Steadfast Pyramid, the first part of the exercise, will last until September 15. It is reportedly “to improve the ability of top-level officers and commanders to plan and lead joint operations,” according to LETA. Steadfast Pinnacle, the next stage of the drill, will last from September 17 until September 22. Steadfast Pyramid and Steadfast Pinnacle were first held in Latvia in 2011.  British General James Everard, the NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, is expected to arrive in Latvia to oversee both stages of the exercise, Latvia’s Defense Ministry said, according to LETA.

NATO soldiers participating in East European war games.

Meanwhile, not much is known so far about NATO"s war games. A NATO fact sheet says Steadfast Pyramid and Steadfast Pinnacle are focused on “further developing the abilities of commanders and senior staff to plan and conduct operations through the application of operational art in decision making.”

Latvia, a former Soviet republic, has seen a major NATO buildup over the past months. Recently, NATO deployed four multinational battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland as part of Enhanced Forward Presence (EFP). These combat-ready battlegroups, led by the UK, Canada, Germany, and the US respectively, are meant to demonstrate “the strength of the transatlantic bond.” A 1,100-strong battlegroup led by Canada is stationed in Latvia, comprising a number of mechanized infantry units as well as a tank company and some support elements, according to NATO.

While NATO has denied it, Moscow has repeatedly accused NATO of offensive behavior, and justifies its own defensive buildup and posture on NATO"s encroachment on Russian borders.

Meanwhile, blissfully unconcerned about the Russian response, Poland and the Baltics have been calling for a stronger military presence in their countries, claiming it is necessary to deter “assertive” Russia. Lithuania has gone so far as suggesting developing a “military Schengen project that would facilitate the movement of troops in Europe.” Earlier this week, Lithuanian Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis said the Benelux countries – Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg – as well as Finland and Estonia, support the plan, which includes “simplifying procedures and investing in infrastructure.”

At the same time, Moscow has consistently said the ongoing buildup threatens Russian and European security. In mid-July, Russian envoy to NATO Alexander Grushko said the alliance is pushing forward for “an intensive mastering of the potential theater of military operations, accompanied by the development of the necessary infrastructure.”

To underscore his point, Grushko added that from July to November, NATO will hold 15 drills complementing each other, “which are held in the same operative field and aimed at providing a vast range of support measures.”

Finally, Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier said that Moscow will not remain silent facing emerging threats on its western borders. NATO’s saber-rattling leaves Russia no other choice than to “give a suitable response to all of these actions,” he said, noting that Moscow’s countermeasures will be “much cheaper,” if not quite as technologically advanced, Putin told award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone.

Will Estonia Be The First Country To Issue Its Own Digital Currency?

Nearly three years after Estonia introduced its “e-residency” program, becoming the first country on Earth to allow foreigners to become “digital citizens,” the tiny Baltic republic is considering another proposal that would further cement its reputation as a digital pioneer: Becoming the first country to launch its own Initial Coin Offering.

In a Medium post published Tuesday, Kaspar Korjus, managing director of Estonia’s e-residency program, explained how such a virtual token – which he has tentatively named Estcoin – would function as a new type of investment allowing investors a “pure play” investment in its development. In this case, the money raised from the IPO would be administered by a public-private trust, and used to improve the country’s already formidable digital infrastructure.

Depending on how quickly the country follows through with this proposal (assuming they do pursue it) Estonia would become the first country to publicly launch a digital currency. The Chinese are developing a prototype called “ChinaCoin,” or “DigitalRMB,” but central-bank authorities say it could be another 10 years before it’s finished and launched.

As Korjus explains, Estonia would have “a clear advantage” in launching a digital token because of its “advanced digital infrastructure” and its e-residency program.

“No other country has come close to developing both the technology and the legal frameworks that would enable them to introduce and securely manage tradable crypto assets globally.”

Korjus said the idea was workshopped with input from Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin. Buterin, Korjus says, envisions the estcoin as a new way to directly invest in a country’s future, rather than buying stocks, bonds or businesses.

“Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has a keen interest in Estonia"s development as a digital nation and has provided valuable feedback for the estcoin proposal.

He believes estcoins could be used to incentivise investors to support the success of a country in a way that is not currently possible through existing means of raising international finance.

‘An ICO within the e-Residency ecosystem would create a strong incentive alignment between e-residents and this fund, and beyond the economic aspect makes the e-residents feel like more of a community since there are more things they can do together,’ says Buterin.”

The coins would give investors “a bigger stake in the future of our country,” Korjust said, something that he hopes would help Estonia crowdsource ideas to improve its digital infrastructure.

“We already know that many people become e-residents simply because they are fans of our country, our technology and our ideas, and being an e-resident enables them to show their support.

A government-supported ICO would give more people a bigger stake in the future of our country and provide not just investment, but also more expertise and ideas to help us grow exponentially.”

Aside from being purely an investment, the coins, if issued on top of a blockchain, could be used in smart contracts, or otherwise as a transfer of value. Meanwhile, the money raised in the offering would be managed by a public-private partnership tasked with helping to build a “new digital nation.”

“The funds raised through Estcoins could be managed through a Public Private Partnership (PPP) and only used as described in the agreement to actually help build the new digital nation. This would enable Estonia to invest in new technologies and innovations for the public sector, from smart contracts to Artificial Intelligence, as well as make it technically scalable to benefit more people around the world. Estonia would then serve a model for how societies of the future can be served in the digital era.

In addition, a large proportion of the funds could be used as a community-run VC fund on behalf of investors. The money could then be used to support Estonian companies, including those established by other e-residents.”

Right now, Estcoin is still just an idea. The next step would be fleshing out the project in greater detail with a White Paper, which means the ICO, if it happens, could still be a few months away. But it’s difficult to imagine an argument for not pursuing it. Even if the coins tank on the secondary market, Estonia will be left with a giant pile of crypto-capital to spend. ICOs have already raised $1.3 billion since the beginning of the year, and analysts at Pitchbook believe that the total for 2017 will be somewhere around $1.7 billion. Earlier this month, a company called Protocol Labs raised nearly $250 million in an exclusive “presale” followed by a public ICO for its Filecoin project – all without a viable product.

Surely, an ICO with a country behind it could make an equally attractive pitch.