The vast gulf between corporate economic interests
and political gamesmanship is vividly made clear with the calls for sanctions against Russia. Now that the Crimea referendum
has resulted in a ninety-six plus desire to join the Russian Federation, the politico chess players in the West are eager
to make Putin suffer. Former Soviet chess master Garry Kasparov, anti-Putin critic and activist said, “even if the West doesn’t want to be in a fight with Russia, Putin has
already decided to start one.”
“I would be warning against using a chess analogy because in chess we have rules, and clearly
Putin doesn’t care about rules because what he’s been doing now in Ukraine, it violates international law and
international treaties Russia has signed before,” Kasparov said on CNN’s “The Lead.”
Kasparov should stick to playing his board gambit and
leave the governance combat to the warhorse oligarchs. One such instigator of social unrest is the infamous and unremorseful
Nazi collaborator, George Soros. The Daily Bell in the report, As Predicted, Ukraine Crisis Used to Argue for a Centralized Europe, cites that “The billionaire financier told The Daily Beast that European governments should have seized on Russia's land grab in Crimea to breathe new life into a union that is disintegrating
and stumbling towards oblivion.” Further into the article,
“It is interesting as well that Soros has a new book out on the very issues
that he is now championing. Did Soros have some special, "insider" information that such a crisis was looming? This
would certainly correspond to our suspicions about what we call directed history.”
This is the same clandestine
manipulator who “backed the "so called" liberation thugs that engaged in street warfare as part of a western
inspired scheme that used George Soros operative fronts as cover.” Such a paradox should not escape the transnational companies that bear the ultimate financial
loss from a speculator who extracts ill-gotten gain from shorting the fortunes of such enterprises.
Here lies the political push back from the corporatists that want to protect
their economic business with Russia. The old cold war byword, attributed to preventing global annihilation, known as MAD is
now a new confrontation of MAED – mutual assured economic destruction.
Sanctions against Russia will blowback against the EU in ways that the technocrats in Brussels
and the fools in Washington DC are unable to envision. The Washington Post states in the article, As talk of sanctions on Russia heats up, business groups draw cautionary line:
“What
we’ve been hearing from our members is a lot of concern that there are two ways America gets hurt in a game like this.
One is by American sanctions, that put them out of business, and the other is by Russian retaliation, regardless of what we
do,” said William Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council. In meetings with the administration and
members of Congress, “we have not been shy about telling them . . . if it is not multilateral, it is not going to work,”
he said.
However, even this notion
tragically lacks a sense of much needed economic consistency for any meaningful rebound in economic prosperity. The Wall Street
Journal article, Ukraine Tensions Hit Global Companies, illustrates this concern with several examples.
- PepsiCo Inc., has billions of dollars at stake in Russia,
its second-largest market by revenue after the U.S.
- Renault SA and other global automakers have invested
heavily in Russia, a relative bright spot in an otherwise-dismal European car market.Russia is the largest market for French dairy group Danone SA, accounting for 11% of sales in 2013.
- Shares in Danish brewer Carlsberg AS,
which generates more than a fifth of its sales in Russia, fell more than 5% Monday.
- Archer Daniels Midland Co., runs a crushing plant in Ukraine, alongside
eight grain-handling facilities, making the country ADM's second-biggest base in Eastern Europe, after Romania.
- Germany's E.ON AG owns a fleet of Russian gas and coal-fired
power plants across key industrial regions of Russia, and is one of Gazprom's single largest customers.
- Italy's Enel SpA controls Russian power company OGK5. Shares
in both companies fell Monday.
- Exxon Mobil Corp, one of the biggest foreign investors in Russia, has raised its bet on the country in
recent years.
Now consider the Trade Picture between the EU and Russia.
- Russia is the third trading partner of the EU and the EU
is the first trading partner of Russia.
- Trade between the two economies showed steep growth rates until mid-2008 when the trend was interrupted
by the economic crisis and unilateral measures adopted by Russia, which had a negative impact on EU-Russia trade. Since 2010
mutual trade has resumed its growth reaching record levels in 2012.
- EU exports to Russia are dominated by machinery and transport
equipment, chemicals, medicines and agricultural products.
- EU imports from Russia are dominated by raw materials, in particular, oil
(crude and refined) and gas. For these products, as well as for other important raw materials, Russia has committed in the
WTO to freeze or reduce its export duties.
- The EU is the most important investor in Russia. It is estimated that up to 75% of Foreign Direct
Investment stocks in Russia come from EU Member States (including Cyprus).
The economic stakes are very high and all factions will be major losers in a
reciprocating sanction trade war. Transnational corporations reflect the following sentiment. "We in the business community do not want to be caught in the crossfire," said
Myron Brilliant, executive vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce.
Corporatocracy opposition to a deliberate sacrifice strategy invented by geopolitical theorists
may well be the best move for stopping, this lame attempt to gain a questionable tactical or positional compensation in some
other form. This chess game has no winner among nations. A loss of economic commerce only helps the vile Soros maneuvers that seek to destroy productive business.
James Hall – March 19, 2014
