From F. William Engdahl:

China is by far Iran’s largest customer for its oil, importing some 650,000 barrels daily of the recent total export by Iran around 2.5 million barrels a day. India is second largest with around 500,000 a day of import. South Korea is third with 313,000 bpd and Turkey fourth at 165,000, according to a recent report by Bloomberg. The likelihood that Iran, which has recently expressed desire to be independent of the dollar, would sell its oil to China in Chinese yuan, is extremely high…

Further indication of growing China-Iran economic ties, on May 10, China launched a direct overland rail service connecting its Inner Mongolia from Bayannur some 8,000 kilometers across Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to Teheran. Freight travel time is estimated at 14 days, some 20 days less than ocean freight time…

Russia-Iran trade has been on a barter non-dollar basis for many products since November 2017…

China is Russia’s largest trade partner with 17% share, double that between Russia and Germany, number two…

Russia in late 2016 established an oil futures contract traded on the St. Petersburg Exchange (SPBEX) using its ruble to price Russian Urals oil futures paralleling the Shanghai petro-yuan futures…

Further insulating the two Eurasian countries from US financial warfare and sanctions, those payments can be made independent of the EU’s SWIFT interbank payments system by using the established China International Payments System (CIPS).

From Ron Paul:

Just two weeks after President Trump pulled the US from the Iran nuclear agreement, his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, issued 12 demands to Iran that could never be satisfied. Pompeo knew his demands would be impossible to meet. They were designed that way. Just like Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia in July, 1914, that led to the beginning of World War I. And just like the impossible demands made of Milosevic in 1999 and of Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 2003, and so many other times when Washington wanted war. These impossible demands are tools of war rather than steps toward peace…

It seems the world has grown tired of neocon threats from Washington. Ironically the “communist” Chinese seem to understand better than the US that in capitalism you do not threaten your customers…

While I am slightly surprised at this development, as a libertarian and a non-interventionist I welcome the growing irrelevance of Washington’s interventionists…

From Eduardo Porter:

The United States is one of the richest, most technologically advanced nations in the history of humanity. And yet it accepts — proudly defends, even — a degree of social dysfunction that would be intolerable in any other rich society…

Black males born in the United States today will probably live shorter lives than boys born in Mexico, China or Turkey.

From Chris Hedges:

The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism…

The press is one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It chatters endlessly like 18th-century courtiers at the court of Versailles about the foibles of the monarch while the peasants lack bread…

Wall Street banks have been handed $16 trillion in bailouts and other subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at nearly zero percent interest since the 2008 financial collapse.

From MoA:

Babchenko found a job with ATR, a Crimean Tatar TV station. The fine-print on the ATR website says that it “was supported by the Media Development Fund of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.”..

The whole hoax, it was explained, was launched to find the people behind an alleged assassination campaign originating in Russia…

Would an operator for Russia hire an Ukrainian nationalist and priest who had fought Russian aligned entities in east-Ukraine to kill a well known anti-Russian figure? Hmmm…

The man charged with trying to organize the murder of the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko announced in court on Thursday that he was acting as a Ukrainian counterintelligence agent…

The court papers show that the whole affair started in February 2016 and was about an attempt to take over a company.

From Michael Hudson:

China can cancel business debt owed to itself. It can proclaim a clean slate. It can minimize debt service to whatever it chooses. But imagine if Chase Manhattan and Goldman Sachs are let in…

China may lose its ability to write down debts if it lets in foreign banks…

Basically the US government should abolish the student debt. That would enable this class of millennials to use their money to make a down payment for an apartment and actually get a place to live, like everybody for the last hundred years has been able to do…

The Democratic donor class loves Trump. They want him to be reelected because he’s cutting their taxes, he’s deregulating their banks, and he’s essentially deregulated fraud!..

Congress last week deregulated community banks. I’ve worked as a consultant for community banks in Chicago. Their strategy is to make more reckless loans than the commercial banks.

From Umair Haque:

I pay $50 dollars for broadband and TV in London — but $200 for the same thing in New York…

America is pioneering a new kind of poverty. The kind of poverty that’s developed in America isn’t just bizarre and gruesome — it’s novel and unseen. It isn’t something that we understand well, economists, intellectuals, thinkers, because we have no good framework to think about it. It’s not absolute poverty like Somalia, and it’s not just relative poverty, like in gilded banana republics. It’s a uniquely American creation. It’s extreme capitalism meets Social Darwinism by way of rugged self-reliance crossed with puritanical cruelty.